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The Guns of August is a sometimes boring and tedious read, but answers your question rather well. The popular opinion back then was that The Great War would be this little scuffle for a couple of weeks or months and then everybody would go home. They had a really romanticized notion about the honor and glory of the war, combined with a lot of nationalism and social pressure to not "shirk" and volunteer for combat. Additionally, a lot of the tech and strategy used in the war had never been seen or contemplated before. Machine guns existed, and I believe they were used on some level during the Balkan Wars a few years earlier, but they were nowhere near as ubiquitous. Plus, the amount of artillery shelling, use of mustard gas and chemical warfare, innovations like tanks and airplanes, had never been used in the past and were probably inconceivable to most.

I suppose you could avoid the draft by heading to a neutral country, but most of these men were conscripted whether they wanted to be or not. But, when every boy of fighting age in your neighborhood is either conscripted or volunteering while everyone is cheering them on, it's pretty easy to see how a young man looking for glory would get swept up in the excitement.

Maybe. The first and second picture are the same picture but scanned differently. Couldn't find any more than these three. As far as I know they are taken from this book. First time I saw these was on cracked (see #10)