The standards of education for high ranking military career officers might vary from country to country - my knowledge of WW1 is mostly related to Italy and I'll lift my examples from there (and I ask leniency for my attempts at imitation of good and bad prose . translating is not my forte); but I dare say that some generalizations are warranted in this case.

First, one needs to understand that in building a show there is a certain incentive in picking the "best" quotes - those which are most impactful, memorable and allow the audience to relate to individuals who lived one hundred years ago. It is understandable and under many aspects helps carrying your point across.

But it also gives you a "wrong" picture. The fact is, everyone took part to the war - to some extent every man, woman and child in countries like Italy (but similarly GB, France, Germany, etc.) was part of the war effort. If you count only the active military, Italy called over five million men - those men wrote, a lot; even those who could barely write (and among the oldest classes literacy was still beliw 50%). Estimates as high as one to two letters per day per active man depending on the year. Most of them are riddled with spelling errors, dull, uneventful repetitions - while they are a remarkable historical documents, and help paint a picture of the actual state of the men on the front line; they are not engaging documents. You would not pick them for your selection of memorable quotes - nor would you pick something from the ordinary military communications.

Thankfully, as we said, everyone took part to the war: that means publicists, poets, painters, novelists; people, that is, that could put their experience into palatable words.

So, for instance this is how Napleone Battaglia recalled his blinding in combat during one of the first major Italian offensives:

Under a rainy sky, rises the Hill of Oslavia, a mud stairway, encased between the Peuma, yellow and reddish of autumn woods, and the Sabotino, giant, bare, gray, stony, touched of autumn on the slopes below. I am on the conquered peak, where livid water pools in mud gray. In front of me rises a bank, overgrown of dead vines, such as blackened bones, and among the funereal drought of those trees the motions of my soldiers shooting at the opposing hill. On that side of the bank which is edge to a pathway, there is a stone fountain that seems to shade devoutly a dead crucified in the mud, a human cross that shows a white face of light. And from those holy stones along the whole road, up to the village ruins, still rising to the sky his half belfry, more corpses dark, Austrians all, akin to tangles of cloth, filthy with blood and mud, from which a pale hand sticks out, or a pale face with glass eyes under the livid cloudy light. And there's one who lays down with his head split and looks like he is drinking, beastly curved on the pool of blood. And more are there, their backs to the sky, as if in dying they had chosen to kneel on sacred ground. That's the last I have seen of earth and sky, the last visions I hold in my heart. Then a dark wall begins that bars the world to me, casts an eternal night in me.

Battaglia was a young officer - like many others he had been chosen out of necessity because he knew his letters and numbers. By 1916 Italy had such a need of new officers that having had some formal education was more than enough to qualify for the crash course (usually four to six weeks) and enter the ranks. He had studied physics and mathematics in Turin. Now, generally speaking a military school attendant was supposed to have an education - including a classical education, the extent of which in pre-satndardized education depended a lot on the particular school - but from that to being eloquent in a literary sense, I'd say the average military writing about the war (Caviglia, Diaz, Cadorna himself) are not masterpieces.

Another officer by necessity - an another volunteer - was newlywed Adolfo Omodeo who wrote to is wife about the experience of the war:

Oh, that the sorrows of war were only the marches, the cold, the hunger, the trench; and valor nothing but contempt of death! The true misery is holding together, to suffer through the strain that day by day marks “another” life, empty of anything but that, of any thought but that, to turn into a living Caryatid under a weight that's never lifted, endless […] so that I feel like a stone in a wall, like those supports, machinery, groaning under the burden of my pieces, once trees majestic, now tortured timbers.

Omodeo had graduated under Giovanni Gentile in 1912 - on the path to a promising academic career; and would later be a historian and briefly Ministry of Education.

And another prominent student - this time of Benedetto Croce - was Enzo Petraccone, who died in the trenches on 1918. After his degree he had started a career as a writer, and kept a weirdly personal diary during the Great War with surviving pieces like this one:

I'd rather not sleep. I prefer insomnia […] in which at least I can be me, and worth something. […] I look at the marvelous display of myself […] Almost as if, at the warmth of the lights, my soul and mind liquefied, I float in a large shore-less sea, pacific and thick as oil; then I sink in it, slowly, without moving, without doing anything to resist the force that calls upon me […] down in this grand produce of thawing, of dissolution, a chaos of all my ideas old and new merging together, with my past, empty aspirations, vague dreams, memories of love, childhood, youth gone by, foresight of a poor joyless maturity, and all those distillates of pleasures, of things longed for and regrets...

But we could as easily pick one of the many letters of common soldiers; whose experience of the war and cultural formation often set them apart from officers. So that the letter from a private - recovered from the military courts archives - would show a less literary inclination:

That's a bunch of crooks back in Italy; but they'll pay back once the war is over … I have always told you well to keep you up, but I got to a point I need to spit it out … I have been a liar so far, that it was all make believe … they feed us stuff that even beasts don't want to look at it … I am fed up with this war and there is no beginning for peace … once we are done we'll throw ourselves on the ground … but rest assured I won't die for this rotten Italy!

And similar sentiments were expressed by one unnamed prisoner of war; according to whom war was made:

to destroy the mankind; because the rich saw himself crushed by the poverty and thus they kill them all, poor innocents sons of them Italians miserable

And another draftee who sadly detailed his escamotage to avoid active service:

to stay in the back of the front it was need to suffer some for being turned down but with all that nothing to do [he] had fattened and his face was so that they told he even was doing fine without teeth.

And what about quotes from ministries? Here's Sidney Sonnino - the mind behind Italy's forign policy during the Great War - in Versailles, after dinner, in February 1918:

I have read that this world war comes from the passage of the last comet close to earth. The comet has poisoned the earth. A few times I have considered this explanation. There must be something in the world that overpowers our will these years. We have all gone mad. Madness alone, unrestrained, is the mistress of men. Then so, how can we claim to control our fate?

I reckon this one is better for the purpose of a Great War info-tainment program. But there is a need to remember that the experience of the War was for many men much more miserable that the greatest quotes about the misery of war may suggest - because unfortunately for them their thoughts and experiences don't make the cut.