The Great War
Europe’s commemorations may perhaps end a 100-year haunting, says our obituaries editor, in the first of three articles on the centenary of the first world war
The human devastation it produced was also extremely localised. As was traditional in warfare, fighting men were still each other’s targets, rather than civilians. Perhaps 8.5m people died, against 60m in 1939-45; but more than 1m of these were from the British Empire, nearly double the total for the second war, and more than 5% of the force was lost on one day, July 1st 1916, the opening of the battle of the Somme. The title “Great” sprang perhaps from this single strategic disaster, and nothing more.
For there was nothing great about this war, and little new. In order to conduct it, soldiers were conscripted in their thousands and sent to their deaths by decorated generals well away from the lines; but such has been the lot of soldiers since armies began. In order to kill and maim more efficiently, machine guns and tanks were brought into play; but the tanks failed to work, and the Maxim gun had already been deployed in the Boer War in South Africa. Photographers exhaustively recorded the squalor of trenches, the wasteland of battlefields and foxholes, the junk-piles of decomposing bodies; but Matthew Brady in the 1860s had publicised such horrors in the aftermath of Bull Run and Antietam. He had captured, too, the dull, haggard look on the faces of men who had seen too much and could not speak of it at home. On the list of history’s bloody clashes between tribes and nations, the Great War did not stand out.
It was different, people said, because of the brutal disconnection between the way the war was welcomed in 1914, with those pressing, joyous queues in the August sun at the recruitment offices, and the awful disillusion as it bogged down and the casualties mounted. But enthusiasm for war, from buckling on armour to rippling standards to determined sightseeing, colours the medieval chronicles, as does the fear, weariness and boredom that set in afterwards. To sit around for months in mud,with rotten food, was nothing new.
The war after which there were meant to be no more
The first world war was different, people said, because it inspired
an extraordinary body of poetry and art: the unsparing stanzas of
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the jilted patriotism of Rupert
Brooke, the ravaged trees and burning skies of Paul Nash. Yet the
unvarnished description of death in battle began with Homer, whose
stoved-in heads and spilling guts are every bit as chilling as Owen’s
“froth-corrupted lungs”; and nothing in the drawing of conflict was more
terrible than Goya’s espaliered and impaled peasants of the Peninsular
War. Even the relentless morbidity of the Great War poets, their
understandable obsession with burial, bleak pastoral and lovers left
behind, was in a continuum with the late-19th-century sadness of Thomas
Hardy and A.E. Housman, whose young men are ineluctably drifting towards
their deaths. Something was in the air for years before the war.Equally, the world that seemed destroyed by the war was already disintegrating before it. Edward Thomas mourned the countryside lost, and H.G. Wells noted deference disappearing. Young women were wearing ties, cutting their hair and going after men’s jobs. The polite, effete Liberal Party was steadily giving way to the brawny politics of organised labour. Before 1914 Kandinsky was painting his “Improvisations”, Joyce had started “Ulysses” and Stravinsky had written “The Rite of Spring”. The Earth had already tilted towards chaos, long before it sank deep into a swampy labyrinth in Flanders.
Other things lasted, when the Great War was supposed to have mortally damaged them. Notions of honour, duty and country persisted up to the second war, and intermittently afterwards; patriotism did not seem to be generally devalued because it had been harnessed in a dubious cause. The British Empire survived, with the king sporting the crown imperial on postage stamps. The bittersweet humour of cartoons and army songs lasted right to the end of the war; the conflict was not so great, or overwhelming, that laughter was expunged. Family postcards from 1917 show “our troops” still grinning from their tents in Gallipoli, having a lark, despite everything.
Until recently old men still lived whose eyes, milky with cataracts, had seen the battlefields of the Great War and whose quavering voices could still describe them. Their presence made the war unbearably poignant, but still did not explain the haunting. The second world war, also with its ageing witnesses, did not dog people so.
The Great War came to signify lives wasted to no purpose; in that, it had no rivals. And falling so early in the 20th century, it came to hijack it, as if the prefix “Nineteen” could never quite lose the stain of mud and blood. This was the war after which there were meant to be no more; each subsequent war, therefore, was a betrayal of those who had died in it, a sign that the world had not, after all, honoured their sacrifice. After 2014, when the world fulsomely tries to make it up to them, the uniformed ghosts may begin to be gently shaken off. One hundred years may, after all, be long enough to mourn.
th its ageing witnesses, did not dog people so.
ReplyDeleteThe Great War came to signify lives wasted to no purpose; in that, it had no rivals. And falling so early in the 20th century, it came to hijack it, as if the prefix “Nineteen” could never quite lose the stain of mud and blood. This was the war after which there were meant to be no more; each subsequent war, therefore, was a betrayal of those who had died in it, a sign that the world had not, after all, honoured their sacrifice. After 2014, when the world fulsomely tries to