In America, we think of World War II as the “big” war. The war the biggest impact. The war that shapes our self-perception as a nation. For France and Britain and the British Commonwealth countries like Canada, New Zealand, and Australia it is World War I which is the “big” war.
Millions had died before the U.S. even showed up, near the very end of the war. The adult male populations of entire villages, half a world away from the fighting, wiped out. Entire university classes wiped out. Psychic scars that persist to this day.
The armistice was signed on 11 November, 2018. I’ve never had the privilege of being in a Commonwealth country on a Remembrance Day, let alone the centenary.
Dan Carlin’s podcast had reminded me of a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s Tender is the Night which always moves & horrifies me to read:
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
I, too, have grown up under the Romantic veil of Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne. But I’ve also seen the crater at Petersburg.
I fear that America has drifted through its own “century of middle-class love” and I fear what apocalyptic delusions that might engender.
Never again. Please, please, never again.
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