"the heart of Europe was bled white"

If we wonder today why Europeans are gun shy, why their foreign policy would make the Vicar of Bray seem bold and decisive, why their culture seems to have become decadent and even degenerate, why homosexuality and libertinism seem rampant there, maybe we are seeing the cost paid in two world wars having a seriously enervating and demoralising effect on today's Europeans. It may be too much to suggest that only the timid and weak survived to mate and produce offspring. But it has often been said that the heart of Europe was bled white on the battlefields of the First World War.

—from G. Thomas Fitzpatrick at Recta Ratio.