"When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." -- Nietzsche
One hundred years ago a Great War began that was supposed to end all wars. It simply became daily more horrific and more devastating than anyone -- soldiers, civilians, politicians, the whole world -- had imagined war could be. But what made it distinct from either previous or later wars? That's a question I've puzzled over for many years.
On the face of it, the sweeping changes in war's technologies and strategies made it different. It was the first time aircraft were used with weapons; it was the first time chemical weapons were used on a mass scale, bringing soldiers to blindness or to coughing up parts of lungs. It was the first time systematic genocide occurred. It was the first time actual, automatic machine guns were used, that could literally cut across lines of men. It was the first time armored tanks were developed and used. It was the first time civilians were deliberately targeted by the newly developed, long-range cannons fired into Belgium and Paris from tens of miles away. And it was the first time that cities, including London and other areas of England, were bombed from aircraft (dirigibles as well as airplanes). It was the first time that underground rooms ("mines") were dug beneath enemy lines, crammed with high explosives, and detonated, sending acres of earth and blasted pieces of men thousands of feet in the air. RAF pilot Cecil Lewis, flying over Hawthorn Ridge, measured earth flying to 4,000 feet by his altimeter. In one case an entire village was, with a series of mines, blown into the air -- the Butte de Vauquois [Link].
Men were for periods living, often with the bodies of their dead pals along side, in a web of trenches and an underground mesh of tunnels that ran from the coast in Belgium, south through the entirety of France without stop to the border of Switzerland. There soldiers remained in the mud, blood, and filth until they, too, were smashed, wounded with a "cushy" that sent them home, or relieved by another unit, only to return to the trenches days later.
The Web of Trenches at Hawthorn Ridge, the Somme
Oxymoronically, many of the newly machined recoil cannons were mounted on the wooden wagon wheels -- a feature of previous eons -- still towed by animals and men. But this new weaponry created carnage that outpaced the armies' strategies to repel attacks or to advance, and the carnage was far beyond medical technology's ability to heal. If soldiers escaped with but a slight wound, gangrene easily set in (there were no antibiotics), and that would slowly finish the work the shells, bullets, and barbed wire had begun.
Another distinct feature of this war is found in its devastation of the earth: the Front became a moonscape of mud -- shell holes mixed with bodies and the junk of war that stretched across western and eastern Europe. As Siegfried Sassoon, one soldier-poet from the First World War, expressed it, "...altogether, I found that Armageddon was too immense for my solitary imagination." The earth along the Western Front still bears the marks of trenches, still yields some 200 tons of unexploded shells and grenades every year, and it still has the highest concentration of tetanus in the world. All of this is beyond the human bones that continue to emerge from the ground.
We Are Making a New World. Paul Nash, 1918
But the most significant way that the Great War was different hinges upon what it did inside humans for the first time. It obliterated an internal existence, a collective mode of reference held in common by people before the war. As Paul Fussell put it in his minimalist way, 1914 was the last moment in time that "we could assume that people were nice."
After sending people into a living hell, our assumptions had changed: we could no longer be optimistic about history and the people who make it. The world of optimistic assumptions described by Victorians like Charles Dickens was gone: gone was the belief that people were essentially good, that they had a sense of propriety, decency, decorum. The Victorians assumed that, while there were, indeed, malevolent, greedy, and violent individuals out there, on the whole people were, like Oliver Twist, innately good and incorruptible -- or at least could agree on some common values to preserve life, society, civilization.
This sense can be seen even in the last moments of the war. Emmet Johns, a WWI veteran, whom I interviewed when he was 103 years old, told me the story of the Armistice on the front -- the very moment when the fighting ceased. His unit was in cover, waiting to attack a captured French village in order to push the Germans out of it. It would mean a great number of casualties on both sides -- most certainly for Johns' unit as they would move into the open to attack.
Johns explained that the hope for a cease fire hovered over the troops in those long minutes. But if the order to attack arrived, for many it would mean dying just moments before the war ended. Johns told of the cannons firing at an immense rate, creating a din that was imaginable. Historians tell us this furious barrage was done out of practical consideration: artillery units fired every shell they could so they would not have to load the heavy shells back on wagons and return them to ammunition depots if the cease-fire occurred.
Johns and his unit hunkered down in the midst of the continuous shelling when suddenly, as Johns described it,
Everything was quiet. You could hear birds chirping. And then a French soldier was running down the road shouting "La guerre est finie! La guerre est finie!"Not, that is, "We won!" but "The war is over!" That was the Armistice on Nov. 11th 1918 at 11:00 a.m. The war succeeded in setting the toe tag on the corpse of human optimism for -- among other things -- traditional politics, for traditional morality, for blind hope in technology, for human innocence.
At least it did so for those who attempted to understand just what had happened to the world. Just read your Hemingway, your Vera Brittain, your Evelyn Waugh.... The disillusion and deep-seated cynicism (albeit with darkly ironic humor) is what we inherited from the Great War.
After the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, each allied nation created a "Victory" medal for its veterans. On the back of these medals was printed -- in each nation's own language -- this phrase: "The Great War for Civilisation."
The Great War for Civilization
Victory Medals: (Left) Belgian, Front; (Right) British, Back
Did it end all wars? No; it changed how wars would be fought in future and undermined our underlying "ethics" of war. Did it save civilization? No; it changed everything we could henceforth assume was "civilized" and what we could safely assume about human beings.
The most articulate question I believe anyone has ever asked about this war, or about any war, is one from Annette Becker and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau in their book Understanding the Great War: 1914-1918:
"What is the weight of the dead upon the living?"
Many people (excepting the politicians and industrialists who lead us into wars) have attempted to answer this question, including people like Eric Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front and The Road Back, like Joseph Heller in Catch 22, like Alan Alda in M.A.S.H., like Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried, or like Brian Turner in Here, Bullet!
The point is that we who survive war must carry the weight of our dead, and we may not put that weight down. It remains with us. That is precisely why we must understand the Great War. Remembering with monuments, cenotaphs, and tombs of the unknown -- with poems, with annual remembrance days -- all that remembering is different from understanding. It is rather imperative to understand how it changed us and what weight it left us with.
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