Time to revisit this post about the effects of WWI
I noticed in some recent comments that a lot of people believe that World War I was a turning point in the changes we’ve seen in attitudes towards the foundations of Western Civilization. That reminded me of the following post of mine, which first appeared here in December of 2012. The title was “We have never recovered from World War I,” and the first sentence was, “And I fear we never shall.”
What follows here is the rest of the post.
When I was in school, World War I was hardly touched on in my history classes, so eager were the teachers to get to World War II before the year was over. It was only though reading a review of the Paul Fussell book The Great War and Modern Memory when it first came out in 1975, and then being intrigued enough to read the book itself, that I first learned what a cataclysmic event the First World War was, both in terms of death rates and in its psychological and even spiritual, as well as cultural, effects.
The first hint was this quote by Henry James, from a letter he wrote to a friend the day after Britain entered the war:
The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.
If you hack through James’ typically complex syntax, you’ll see a perfect encapsulation of the effect of the war: blood and darkness, giving the lie to what people of that age thought “civilization” had meant. The war caused people to look back at all the years of seeming progress and regard them as a cruel, tantalizing, misleading illusion, a sort of trick played on naive people who now looked back at the history they themselves had lived through, tearing off their previous rose-colored glasses and now seeing a stark and terrible vision.
We have been stuck with that vision ever since. Whether people are aware of the details of the events of WWI or not, they are part of a culture of profound cynicism that took hold of the Western world afterward and has been part of the reason for its decline. Simply put, the West lost a great deal of its boundless confidence in itself.
This article that appeared in American Heritage goes over much the same territory:
This almost unimaginable destruction of human life, to no purpose whatsoever, struck at the very vitals of Western society. For this reason alone, among the casualties of the First World War were not only the millions of soldiers who had died for nothing, most of the royalty of Europe, and treasure beyond reckoning but nearly all the fundamental philosophical and cultural assumptions of the civilization that had suffered this self-induced catastrophe.
For there was one thing that was immediately clear to all about the Great War – as the generation who fought it called it – and that was that this awful tragedy was a human and wholly local phenomenon. There was no volcano, no wrathful God, no horde of barbarians out of the East. Western culture had done this to itself. Because of the war, it seemed to many a matter of inescapable logic that Western culture must be deeply, inherently flawed.
The pre-WWI ethos was quite different. The American Heritage article uses author Edith Wharton’s world as an example, but Henry James would have done just as nicely:
Because of this fantastic record of progress, the people of Edith Wharton’s world believed in the inevitability of further progress and the certainty that science would triumph. They believed in the ever-widening spread of democracy and the rule of law. They believed in the adequacy of the present and the bright promise of the future. To be sure, they fought ferociously over the details of how to proceed, but they had no doubt whatever that the basic principles that guided their society were correct.
Then, all at once, the shots rang out in Sarajevo, the politicians bungled, the armies marched, the poppies began to blow between the crosses row on row. The faith of the Western world in the soundness of its civilization died in the trenches of the western front.
Seventy-five years later, richer, more powerful, more learned than ever, the West still struggles to pick up the psychological pieces, to regain its poise, to find again the self-confidence that in the nineteenth century it took entirely for granted.
Subsequent events played a part, as well. World War II was a very different war fought for very different reasons; unlike its predecessor, the lines of good vs. evil were crystal clear. But that didn’t make the carnage and the profoundly wearying nature of the war any less disillusioning, it’s just that it was disillusioning in a different way, this time about the human race’s propensity for cruelty and hatred and violence. And of course there’s been the long Gramscian march of the left through the West’s basic institutions such as the church, education, and the media, working constantly to undermine the West from the inside. What we see now are the results of all of this. It’s a miracle there’s any vigor left at all.
The time gap between WWI and WWII is also a big part of the effect it had on Europe especially. Almost exactly one generation and that made the psychic harm even more damaging. Almost every European since then has some sort of family connection to this. Women losing their husbands to one war and their sons to the next. Obviously that is unbelievably damaging to the pysche of a population.
I don’t see it quite that way. I have been fascinated by WWI since 7th grade, when I got hold of Churchill’s World Crisis, and was spellbound. (I have retained a fascination with navies ever since, though that may have started earlier.)
But the notion that it was “all for nothing” was not shared by Churchill, nor by writers as different as Chesterton and Orwell.
As to the loss of self-confidence in progress, well while that has a bad side, it’s also a loss of hubris. And it did not die entirely in WWI. I am (just) old enough to remember the sunny optimism of American liberalism of the early 60s. I actually knew people who thought we would have happy future under UN rule.
Eeyore:
I think “all for nothing” was a very common perception, not necessarily among political leaders but among regular people. It certainly was not a universal perception, either.
The interesting thing about WWI is how it started and what there was after it was over. The western allies ‘won’ the war but after it was over nothing was really any better and now they had Lenin and a bunch of aggrieved Germans pining for the next war to make up for it. They ‘won’ the war yet the lay of the land after victory was much worse than before.
I think that was where the ‘all for nothing’ attitude came in. I don’t think that was there at all after WWII. That war was not ‘all for nothing’ or at least that perception was not there.
When I was in high school, my history teacher spent a good deal of time on WWI, not just because he saw it as Act I of WWII, but also because he wanted us to understand one fundamental way in which it changed the United States– namely, propelling us from second-tier status among the nations of the world to one of the Great Powers on a par with France, the UK, Germany, etc. While it’s true that the U.S. Marines and the Army didn’t arrive in Europe in force until 1918, and suffered 117,000 deaths from all causes, these deaths amounted to 0.1% of the U.S. population, compared to over 2 million dead for Germany, 4.2% of the population. For purposes of comparison, the Civil War cost us between 5 and 6 times as many soldiers and sailors as WWI, and that was when the total population of the country was only 31 million.
Nonetheless WWI was the first major war in which we were cast as the rescuer/caregiver of Europe, and by extension, the first responder to the rest of the world in WWII. The term “superpower” was first coined in 1944, when it was applied to the US, the USSR, and the British Empire. It’s a status/burden we have had to carry ever since– need I add, increasingly badly in recent years.
I read Fussell’s book on the Great War in the early 1980s, still have my copy of it. An interesting video on the same subject is David Reynolds’ presentation on the scars of the Great War in Western Europe, Part I of a three-part series titled “The Long Shadow.” Reynolds’ main point is that popular views of WWI have shifted over the century since 1914:
https://youtu.be/iPYxS5h4x34
The second and third parts are well worth watching too.
Neo–
Something went wrong when I posted the link to Prof. Reynolds’ video. Is there any way you can re-cue it back to the beginning of the video? for some reason, it starts partway through. Many thanks!
PA Cat:
I fixed it.
Neo–
Many thanks again. I’ve noticed a lot of comments on YouTube lately about glitches with the site’s videos as well as its online chat feature, so I’m not alone. But I do appreciate your help.
“the poppies began to blow between the crosses row on row.” I have walked between the crosses, doing a WWI tour from Ypres to Verdun. It is like a blow to your stomach. Cemetaries everywhere, large ones. So many. Visited the Battlefields, seeing the trenches, and areas that are still no go areas because of the unexploded ordnance. People that criticize the French for there actions do not understand the utter devastation to the land and damage to the French psyche. The war in the Ukraine can be seen as an extension of WWI, or even the Napoleonic Wars. Heck, lets go back to the Thiry Years War.
Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, wrote another book, The Road Back, which is not nearly as well-known, but should be. It is sort of a sequel to All Quiet…almost all of it takes place after the war ends…and I think of it as the fictional counterpart to The Great War and Modern Memory.
My review:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/21350.html
My fascination with WWI was propelled by my Grandfather’s participation. 5 years ago I spent time in France and Germany retracing his path. He was part of the brief American occupation in the Rhineland. Walking amongst the seemingly endless tombstones in the American cemeteries in France is humbling.
Read Vera Miles, A Testament of Youth, for a feminine middle class “progressive” view of the conflict. With 20/20 hindsight we can see where her views have brought us to, but her pain was quite real and as a nurse she participated in the immediate aftermath of that catastrophe. She, like many others, learned the wrong lesson, pacifism, while emotionally satisfying, does not deter tyrants.
Dave:
Minor correction; A Testament of Youth was written by Vera Brittain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_of_Youth
The other Vera was an actress, and a good one.
One of my university/grad school history profs was pretty sold on the idea that WWI was also a blow to the spiritual psyche of the nations involved. His point was that almost all the combatants were part of the old Christendom (Christian nations if even in name only) and folks were able to point that out & say, “You invented new methods of ruthless industrial killing efficiency! Is that Christianity?!?!?!?” So even though in the US there was a resurgence in overt forms of faith (church attendance & Sunday School participation increases) the underlying bedrock faith was eroded.
He also pointed out that post-WWI & WWII saw a flood of non-Christians into the West…mostly Marxists but others as well who fully engaged in the Gramscian march or simply did what they could no longer do among Communists or Nazis in academia, (especially in the theological schools of Western Europe & the US) media, politics, entertainment etc…
He was pretty convinced & convincing at the time…I’m certainly open to his perspective…but that doesn’t mean he was the only right answer.
”Whether people are aware of the details of the events of WWI or not, they are part of a culture of profound cynicism that took hold of the Western world afterward and has been part of the reason for its decline.” (emphasis mine)
Not Western. European.
America emerged from the Great War stronger, bolder, and more confident than ever before — one of the world’s great powers. Then it emerged from World War II even stronger, bolder, and more confident still — as history’s greatest superpower. We went on to split the atom, break the sound barrier, and walk on the moon.
No, the cynicism and despair that ravaged Europe after World War I didn’t take hold in America until well after World War II. In fact, we can pinpoint the exact day.
@ David Foster > thanks for your review of Remarque’s book “The Road Back.” I hope you won’t mind my lifting one of your own comments, as it seems relevant to our own situation 12 years further on. For “Nazis” the most applicable current substitute is “China,” but the observation also applies to any suitably vocal extremist agitators.
David Foster
March 31, 2011 at 2:06 pm
This book was actually turned into a movie in 1937 (Universal Pictures–directed by James Whale.) By this time, all of Remarque’s novels had been banned in Germany by the Nazi government, and that government threatened a boycott of all Universal films unless the anti-Nazi sentiments were toned down. The new studio heads caved in to the pressure and edited the film prior to release to make it less offensive to Nazis.
So it’s interesting to note that caving in to the enemies of civilization is not a totally new thing in Hollywood.
And it has only gotten worse.
Forgot the blockquotes; the last line is my addition.
you look at the long view over a span of a century, this is what michael burleigh, tried to sum up in sacred places, what the war did to Russia, to Germany but even victors like Britain and France, how it sowed the seeds for the next more brutal meat grinder, how it led to the Soviet control of half of Europe, who ended up in charge, Germany, with Marxists like Spinelli creating the shell of this brand new Oceania,
James Whale served as an infantry officer with the British Army in WWI. “The Road Back”, a box-office failure, marked the beginning of the end of his career in Hollywood. In failing health, he committed suicide in 1957. The movie “Gods and Monsters” (1998) is a fictionalized treatment of his last days.
An American counterpart to Remarque’s “The Road Back” is William March’s novel “Company K” (1933), which begins and ends with episodes of postwar disillusionment. March served with the 5th Marines in WWI; he was wounded at Belleau Wood and took part in the battles of Soissons, St.-Mihiel, and Blanc Mont, where he was wounded for a second time. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Navy Cross for his actions in that battle. Born poor in Mobile, Alabama, March became a successful businessman (shipping) after the war. He retired on his investments in the late 1930s and devoted himself to writing. He died in New Orleans in 1954. His best-known work is “The Bad Seed”, which was published shortly before his death.
For what it’s worth, both Whale and March were homosexual. Whale openly, March covertly. They also suffered from combat-induced PTSD.
MKent: “No, the cynicism and despair that ravaged Europe after World War I didn’t take hold in America until well after World War II. In fact, we can pinpoint the exact day.”
I can think of a number of candidates, starting with November 22, 1963–a date which continues to live in infamy (e.g. see Robert Kennedy Jr.’s recent interview with Tucker Carlson). Which day did you have in mind?
Unnecessary is not the same as pointless. WWI was unnecessary as Europe came to see great power rivalry as unnecessary. (Excepting National Socialism, obviously.) But to a Frenchman or Belgian, removing German militarists from their country was not pointless.
Frank Furedi has a book about the legacy of WWI and one about the origins of the Ukraine war. He sees this latest war as a legacy of the earlier one. Also, in his view, the reason why Western Europe was blindsided by the Ukraine war (the main subject of the recent book) is its rejection of nationalism after the two world wars.
Company K was made into a movie. A very low budget one shot at Indiantown Gap PA. I wasn’t that impressed by the picture, but might see it again to check if there was anything I missed. Recent films have also been made of the British novel The Better Parts of Fortune and play Journey’s End — and of course, there’s 1917.
In Europe there was a romance about the war in spite of — or even because of — its horrible destructiveness. Maybe it’s the same reason we watch so many zombie apocalypse shows. Seeing the end of the world and facing annhilation can be exhilarating for people — if it’s not their world or their life that is ending. The war brought together the last of the aristocratic world and the early stirrings of the mass world that was to replace it. So you have the last of the courtly knights and nostalgic memories of music hall songs and comedians and great-grandad’s big adventure.
I have walked between the crosses, doing a WWI tour from Ypres to Verdun. It is like a blow to your stomach. Cemetaries everywhere, large ones. So many.
I have too but what impressed me the most is the great arch in Ypres with the 57,000 names of British soldiers whose bodies were never found. I found the grave of Revere Osler, the only son of the great physician and teacher Sir William Osler. The father never recovered.
WW I is the first war, except for some short-lived border skirmishes, in which more died of wounds than of illness.
This was because of getting a handle on field sanitation, for the most part.
So a larger proportion were killed in combat and the usual multiple were wounded. They lived through their wounding due to advances in military medicine and the defeat of sepsis.
But cosmetic and reconstructive surgery barely existed. So, instead of being honored names on the walls of the little country churches…they were your cousin in the upstairs bedroom too torn up to manage his own hygiene.
The French built resorts for guys so hideously mutilated they wouldn’t come out in public.
Masterpiece Theatre introduced their pieces in that era with a martini glass and jumping clarinet music. That wasn’t all there was.
The reminders were even more stark than cemeteries stretching into the dusk. See Tyne Cot.
AesopFan…”So it’s interesting to note that caving in to the enemies of civilization is not a totally new thing in Hollywood.
The German consul in Los Angeles had *influence on Hollywood films” as one of his major assignments.
See my related post So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57018.html
I’ve felt this way for a few years. It may even be because of the original post by Neo, I can’t remember. But look what else happened because of World War 1. The grandeur of music ended. There would never be anything like Mahler’s First written again. Popular music supplanted it, and look where that’s led us. Art was destroyed. We went from The Roll Call to Guernica to a Campbell’s soup can to sharks suspended in formaldehyde. Literature got worse and worse and now no one bothers to read.
The U.S. may have become a superpower, but it’s ruled a planet of ashes, and it’s become decadent and roiled. Is it so hard to believe we’re living in the ruins of a great civilization? We changed everything and now we don’t like what we’ve got.
The machine gun, high explosives, hydraulic recupirators (recoil management for arty), and mass transit (for soldiers and their necessary stuff) = mass casualties.
Debridement, casualty clearing stations, and triage could save some.
A very interesting thread. It is a mystery, and a travesty, that the educational system has paid so little attention to an episode, for lack of a better word, that changed the course of history so dramatically.
At the most basic level, World War 1 is a classic example of likely outcomes when people with power stumble into situations they do not understand. While war had always affected anyone caught up in its maw in horrible ways, as any inhabitant of a city under siege, or peasant in the path of a hungry army would attest; the Monarchs who so easily kicked of WWI had no understanding of what they were unleashing with modern warfare. No concept whatsoever.
One might naively wonder why a sensible person would have not re-considered when the truth became obvious, and said; “Hey Cousin, we made a huge mistake, let’s call the whole thing off”. But, if you ruled by Divine Right, you apparently never admitted mistakes.
But what if you rule by the consent of the people? Around 100 years from now might historians (if there are any) look back and say, “why didn’t the Power Elites who forced Social Progressivism, Green Energy, and many other destructive elements into a freely functioning, capitalistic society recognize, and admit, their mistakes in time.”? The next question to be examined might be, “why were the people so compliant?”
@ David Foster > “See my related post So, Really Want to Talk About Foreign Intervention?”
Thanks for the link; I always enjoy reading your work, especially the older posts from before I “discovered” ChicagoBoyz.
I remember many of the news stories you discussed, although not all of them, and appreciate your putting them in context with additional information.
Which also puts the Biden Inc connections to China in the same context.
David:
See the comment from “that guy” here:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/08/19/a-protest-song-for-our-times-rich-men-north-of-richmond/#comment-2694771
With all due respect to the excellent Econ 101 lesson from Chester Draws, the pursuit of the Perfect Global Comparative Advantage is not necessarily the optimum national policy.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/08/18/vivek-and-tucker/#comment-2694708
mkent,
Wasn’t there a “lost generation” movement in the U.S. led by artists who had been scarred by what they witnessed in WWI?
Hemingway, Porter, Fitzgerald, Stein, Eliot, Steinbeck…
They seemed to have a lot of influence on Americans.
Abraxas: “Company K was made into a movie. A very low budget one shot at Indiantown Gap PA.” And Rhinebeck, NY if I recall correctly. The director was Robert Clem, a low-budget independent filmmaker from Alabama but based (at that time) in the Hudson River Valley. It was an OK movie, but it had the feel of a theatrical production transferred to the screen. It would have worked better as a PBS TV production–something in the old “American Playhouse” series from the 1980s-1990s. As far as I know, it never made it to the theaters.
Richard Aubrey: since we’re on WWI literature, contemporary British novelist Pat Barker wrote a couple of novels about plastic surgery and facial reconstruction in WWI: “Life Class” (2007) and “Toby’s Room” (2012). She also wrote the Regeneration Trilogy (1991-1995). The legacy of WWI casts a long shadow in England.
I didn’t know that march had written the bad seed,
yes they were spectators, to the fight, dos passos had been against Wilson’s war from the outset, it colored his view of the current scene for a generation,
I have longed believed that the events in the period extending from the American Civil War through the 20th century represent the adolescence of Western civilization. The Great War was, in essence, the rebellion against kings,wrongly believed to be parents.
I doubt that we are fully mature even now.
What comes next I cannot say–but I note that becoming fully mature requires the getting and raising of children.
One thing we should remember about Trade: the US, throughout much of its existence, had significant tariffs and indeed they were a big part of federal government revenue.
The question of ***whether it is possible, in a world with cheap transportation and telecommunications, to maintain a significant wage premium over other countries*** is of extreme importance for the US, and it does not only apply to manufacturing jobs. Partly, the premium can be justified by better worker education and motivation (not doing too brilliantly at the first of these, at least), partly by rational regulations, partly by low energy costs (current policies seek the opposite), partly by appropriate tax policy (capital investment expensing, R&D cost expensing)…and partly by proper cost analysis of offshoring decisions to consider not just transportation costs but inventory costs and supply-chain-driven shortages (which a lot of companies did a pretty bad job of)….but I suspect that tariffs will also prove necessary if we want to accomplish this goal.
Two more links that may be useful:
Offshoring of non-manufacturing jobs–Telemigration
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59860.html
Challenging Art Laffer’s assertion that broad-based US prosperity depends on China
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/58984.html
mkent..”In fact, we can pinpoint the exact day”…that day being?
Re: James Whale
I must interject that James Whale is not just some Hollywood guy, whatever his politics or sexuality, but the director of:
_______________________
“Frankenstein” (1931)
“The Invisible Man” (1933)
“Bride of Frankenstein” (1935)
_______________________
Which makes Whale arguably the most seminal Hollywood director of horror. “Bride of Frankenstein” is a particularly remarkable achievement.
Wasn’t there a “lost generation” movement in the U.S. led by artists who had been scarred by what they witnessed in WWI?
Hemingway, Porter, Fitzgerald, Stein, Eliot, Steinbeck…
Rufus T.:
That rings a bell!
Currently I’ve graduated from reading Harry Potter in French to Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” in French — Hemingway’s post WWI novel about the Lost Generation recovering from the Great War. Or something like that….
Interestingly, I find “Sun” is easier to read than Harry Potter. JK Rowling is a master storyteller, but she is not a prose stylist. So many clumsy clauses stacked together bric-a-brac.
Hemingway, on the other hand, was magic. He seemed to bypass the verbal brain and input directly into the reader’s own experience. Technically he accomplished this by stripped-down prose, simple present tense declarative sentences and bare dialog.
Hemingway was an SOB, which I often found annoying, but It’s never hard to read Hemingway, even in French. His writing was flat hypnotic.
huxley:
It makes sense that Hemingway would be easy to read in translation. His prose is so direct and straightforward.
I found that it is also the case that reading Borges in Spanish is relatively easy. I’m not good at foreign languages and my Spanish is pretty bad, but I found that when I tried to read a Borges story in Spanish, it didn’t seem all that hard. It helped, of course, that I was already familiar with the story in English.
huxley and neo,
Agree on Hemingway. “The Old Man and the Sea” was the first German translated novel I read.