The latest allegation against President Trump is that, in France on the centenary of the end of World War I, he privately put down as “losers” our GIs interred at the Aisne-Marne Cemetery. Mr. Trump denies all this, but the Atlantic reports that he also wondered why America would intervene on the side of the Allies, asking his aides: “Who were the good guys in this war?” What in the world might account for such a question?

Maybe, we found ourselves speculating, Mr. Trump had read somewhere the special edition the Atlantic put out in 2014 to mark the 100th anniversary of the start of the Great War. What a cornucopia of hand-wringing, moral equivalence, and posturing. “There is nothing in the life of the lowest of the beasts which can be compared for utter senselessness with this mutual rending to pieces of the nations,” wrote L.P. Jacks.

To say, argued another writer, Benjamin Schwartz, in a piece from 1999, “that Britain fought the war so as not to be dependent on the sufferance of Germany doesn’t settle matters, because the price Britain was compelled to pay to preserve its national independence was truly awful.” Whether “that price was too high,” the writer reckons, is a question that “has haunted the British mind for the past 80 years.”

The Atlantic’s editor in 2014, James Bennet, wrote an introductory piece to the special edition. It quoted Ellery Sedgwick, who’d been at the paper’s helm during the Great War, as rationalizing America’s own entry into the conflict by noting that “alone among the nations of five continents then in conflict,” we would be fighting “not for some selfish purpose,” as Mr. Bennet put it, but — Sedgwick’s words here —“for a world idea.”

That idea seemed to be that the world could yet sustain “security, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Another piece in the Atlantic’s special issue was by H. G. Wells, no less. It was issued in 1919 and plumped for a League of Nations that would be “ultimately a state aiming at that ennobled individual whose city is the world.” No wonder our Senate eventually nixed the idea. It just preferred America.

Not that the Atlantic was alone in wondering what we were doing in World War I. Quite the opposite. Before the war, the noble comrades on the left were all in the peace camp, as were many on the right, including, say, the publisher of Chicago Tribune, Colonel McCormick.* Yet once war erupted, the peace camps on both the right and the left, in Europe and America, swung behind their own governments.

Which brings us back to Mr. Trump. We, for one, don’t care how dumb he might have appeared to his aides as he ruminated on World War I. We’ve no doubt he reveres our fallen GIs and knows that the world is a better place for their sacrifice. He’s no dumber than anyone else on the slaughter that was halted on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. We can still hear it end and marvel at how the birds start to tweet.

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* On the outbreak of the war, the Tribune issued one of the greatest newspaper editorials ever written, “Twilight of the Kings.” It is framed in our library with a cover of the German magazine Simplicissimus. The cover is a drawing of crowns, scepters, and other regalia of kings strewn on a beach. The Tribune’s editorial ended with the immortal words, “The Republic marches east.”

Correction: Aisne-Marne is the American cemetery where the GIs Mr. Trump reportedly disparaged are interred, and the date was the centenary of the end of World War I. The name of the cemetery and the date were given erroneously in the bulldog.