The Great War

War was a fiend who stopped our clocks—Siegfried Sassoon.

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918:  The War to End All Wars is over. 

The resolution calling for the commemoration of Armistice Day in 1926 declared it to be a day dedicated to the cause of world peace, a day of “thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”  It was made an official national holiday in 1938.

The total casualties, both civilian and military, of World War I are estimated at 37 million.  It left an impoverished world, produced a dramatically different global power structure, and, in what has been called the “peace to end all peace,” planted the seeds for  World War II and conflicts that continue to this day.

In the United States publishing on the Great War has always lagged far behind that on World War II or the American Civil War.  There has, however, been an upsurge in recent years – a trend that will probably continue as the centennial of the war approaches.

Many of the newer books focus on lesser-known aspects of the war.  In World War I: The African Front, Edward Paice explores the war in East Africa, where, in addition to significant casualties, the impact on the subsistence economies of the area was devastating and enduring.  Mark Thompson’s The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 examines the war experience of those who fought in the Alps and Dolomites, a largely forgotten front despite Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and the death of a million soldiers.

A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighters’ Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home, by Peter N. Nelson tells the story of the 369^th Infantry Regiment.  The first African American regiment mustered, the Hellfighters fought side by side with the French at the front and ultimately spent more days in the trenches than any other American unit.

The largest and bloodiest single battle in American history was fought during World War I.  Nearly 1.2 million American soldiers participated in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which took place at the very end of the war.  General John J. Pershing believed that American “guts” would crack the German defenses in thirty-six hours.  Six weeks and 120,000 casualties later, the battle ended with the signing of the Armistice.  To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918 by Edward G. Lengel offers an in-depth exploration of this neglected story.

Slaughter, carnage, charnel house, meat-grinder – no other war evokes terms like these quite so readily as World War I.  Seen now as the disastrous combination of 19^th century military tactics with a new and expanding mechanized technology of warfare, it produced a remarkable outpouring of literature. 

In one of the standards, The First World War: A Complete History, author Martin Gilbert spends nearly as much time dealing with poets as he does with generals.  Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, sees the literary outpouring as a specific response to the trenches, a means of assimilating and memorializing the horror of the experience.

My favorite novel on this period is Pat Barker’s Regeneration, a story based on the true relationship of British poet Siegfred Sassoon and psychologist W.H.R. Rivers.  After an heroic two years on the Western front, Sassoon announced his unwillingness to continue serving and published his decision in The Soldier’s Declaration as an act of “willful defiance of military authority.”  His friends, fearful that he would face court martial and imprisonment, had him declared “mentally unsound,” and he was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital to be treated for neurasthenia by Dr. Rivers.

Rivers’ job as an army psychiatrist was to return men to the front.  Neurasthenia, or shell-shock, was only newly recognized and not well understood.  Many still considered it the equivalent of cowardice.  Men of the British upper class, like Rivers and Sassoon, did not lightly dismiss matters of duty and honor.  Sassoon was neither neurasthenic nor a pacifist.  For him, a just war had become an immoral one.  Rivers, working daily with traumatized men, was similarly challenged:  what is a sane response to war?

After World War II and the Korean War, Congress, in 1954, changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day, declaring it to be a day to honor all American veterans for their patriotism, love of country, and willingness to serve and sacrifice for the common good.

Harry Patch, the last British veteran of the World War I trenches, died on July 26, 2009.    He was 111.  Frank Buckles, the last American doughboy, was an ambulance driver on the Western Front.  He is 108 years old and lives in West Virginia.

… O but Everyone was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.-- Siegried Sassoon, Everyone Sang, on the signing of the Armistice.

 

(Photograph from VanDammeMaarten.be, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)