5

CIVILIZATION

Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal.

JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY, 1911

I don’t think these shell-shocked war poems will move ourgrandchildren greatly.

SIR HENRY NEWBOLT, 1924¹

The medal given to British servicemen and -women after victory in 1918 stated that they had fought in “The Great War for Civilisation.” But the reality of that war seemed like the utter negation of civilized values—human beings reduced to the level of animals in the mud or blown to pieces by those miracles of modernity, the machine-gun and heavy artillery. Sixty percent of British Army deaths in the entire war were caused by artillery fire; for the Germans the proportion was even higher. Warfare was not the man-to-man knightly heroics idealized medieval-style on war memorials; it had become an industrial enterprise waged anonymously from afar. The Times war correspondent Col. Charles Repington characterized it as “the butchery of the unknown by the unseen.”²

Even caring for the wounded was an industrial process. The French author Georges Duhamel devoted the final chapter of his prizewinning war memoir, Civilization (1918), to a mobile ambulance unit. This “last word in science” was, he said, a “factory” to repair the “parts of the military machine that are the worst destroyed.” But those “parts” were actually human beings, like the cuirassiers he could see piled up for treatment—“the finest men in France” with big chests and powerful limbs now reduced to “broken statues.” The mobile ambulance, declared Duhamel, was “civilization’s reply to itself, the correction it was giving to its own destructive eruptions.” Yet such a correction could only be superficial: “You can’t climb back up a slope like the one the world is going to roll down from now on.”³

How could one talk about civilization in the wake of such barbarism? That was the question for thinking men and women after 1914. And how should this horrific industrialized war be represented in art, architecture, and literature? Were traditional cultural forms now irrelevant? Intellectuals and artists in all the belligerent countries grappled with these questions, but the British response was distinctive. In part this was because the modernist movements that had swept the Continent had hardly touched prewar Britain, where the pastoral tradition still held sway, particularly in painting and poetry. Equally important, the British government took a uniquely high-profile role in arts patronage, especially for painting during the war and the architecture of commemoration afterward. In Britain artistic modernism was very much a product and a phenomenon of the war years. In the field of English literature modernism had more impact, but not until the 1920s. Together works of art, architecture, and literature helped eventually to create an image of 1914 as the poignant finale of an age of innocence, a second Fall from which Britain was never really redeemed.

Like all “isms,” modernism is a slippery term whose meaning is elusive. But very generally it is used to signify a “crisis of representation” in art and literature in the early twentieth century: a crisis about both what could be represented and how it should be represented, thus raising issues of both content and form.⁴ In art the products of this crisis were images that challenged the conventional principles of perspective that had been used for centuries to depict three-dimensional “reality” on paper or canvas. This revolt took various forms, now known as Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism—movements that seem more coherent in retrospect than they did at the time.

“When we invented cubism,” recalled Pablo Picasso tongue-in-cheek in 1935, “we had no intention whatever of inventing cubism. We simply wanted to express what was in us.”⁵ Painters, of course, have a necessarily ambivalent relationship with tradition—even those from the avant-garde. That term dates back to the revolutions of 1848 and conveys the idea that artists and intellectuals form the vanguard of cultural and political change. “We fight like disorganized ‘savages’ [Wilde] against an old, established power,” proclaimed the German Expressionist Franz Marc in 1912. “The dreaded weapons of the savages are their new ideas. New ideas kill better than steel.”⁶ On a personal level, artists also have an egotistic interest in exaggerating their novelty to distinguish themselves from both teachers and peers. All of these early twentieth-century movements were revolts against national artistic establishments, which shaped the art market and controlled the teaching academies. Yet struggling bohemians have to earn a living and, in the absence of an exclusive contract with a dealer, that meant pandering to the conventional tastes of the elite and middle class via the despised world of galleries and salons. “I am not discouraged by my own powers,” wrote the Italian avant-gardist Umberto Boccioni in 1907, “but over my financial means, which don’t ever seem to increase without the most ignoble self-prostitution.”⁷ Much of art history is framed between these competing pressures of heady revolt against tradition and the necessary embrace of patronage.

Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism were all reactions to what was deemed the superficiality of Impressionist art, mesmerized by ephemeral surface appearances. Cubism engaged in novel ways with form and space, breaking them down into fragments: the term “cubist” was coined in 1908 after a critic mocked a painting full of “little cubes.” Its artist was Georges Braque—once regarded in Gertrude Stein’s words as “the one who put up the hooks” for Picasso’s canvases, but now recognized as his partner in a “dual effort” of friendly, creative rivalry between 1908 and 1914 that has been described as the “most phenomenal” relationship in the history of art.⁸ Although Picasso’s traumatic brothel scene, decorously known to posterity as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is now dubbed the “first” Cubist painting, much of the Picasso-Braque oeuvre was not exhibited and sold before the Great War because the two artists enjoyed secure patronage. The Demoiselles achieved cult status only in the late 1930s, after being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. More celebrated in prewar Europe was the work of so-called salon Cubists such as Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and Henri Le Fauconnier. The latter’s Abundance has been described as “perhaps the best-known Cubist painting in Europe before 1914.” Gleizes and Metzinger promoted the Salonists’ work as a distinct movement in their influential book Du “Cubisme” (1912). There was also a nationalist undertone to Cubism’s appeal: it could be seen as a reinvention of classical painting that was proudly French—hence the frequent depiction of the Eiffel Tower, the preeminent symbol in the 1900s of France’s modernity.⁹

Expressionist painters presented themselves explicitly as a reaction to French Impressionism. The Austrian critic Hermann Bahr asserted that Impressionism was the “consummation” of classical art, seeking to “rule out every inner response to the outer stimulus,” to “leave nothing to man but his retina” whereas the Expressionist “tears open the mouth of humanity” so as to “give the spirit’s reply.”¹⁰ Bahr was writing during the Great War as part of the nationalist culture war that accompanied the military conflict: theorists sought to reify expressionism as a radical and distinctively German movement in modern art. Earlier usage of the term expressionist, by contrast, was more catholic and embraced artists such as Braque and Picasso, all of whom supposedly privileged subjective response over visual impression. That said, Expressionist art was indeed rooted in the Germanic world. It included groups such as the Bridge (Die Brücke), which originated in Dresden in 1905, and the more programmatic Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) circle who exhibited in Munich in 1911–12 and toured continental Europe. Their expressive response was evident most of all in abstracted forms and vivid, non-naturalistic color to convey emotion, not least a sense of horror at the travails of modernity. Expressionist art romanticized the past and celebrated the natural and erotic: the term “blue rider” stemmed from Wassily Kandinsky’s fascination with medieval knights and Franz Marc’s obsession with horses.

Futurism, by contrast, reveled in modernity; it was also the most ideological of these three artistic movements. Its “Futurist Manifesto” of February 1909, authored by the flashy Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, affirmed the “beauty” of the modern industrialized world, a world of “speed,” of soaring airplanes, “great-breasted locomotives” and the “roaring motor car.” Futurists sought to “glorify war” as “the world’s only means of keeping itself clean” (sola igiene del mondo). The manifesto of “ruinous and incendiary violence” was aimed particularly at Italy, with its “gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tour guides and antiquaries,” but it was also a nationalist riposte to Cubism and Expressionism, to prove that Italians could embrace the modern with more ardor than their northern neighbors.¹¹ Much Futurist art was overtly political. The Revolt by Luigi Russolo (1911) depicted a red mass of frenzied but abstract humans driving a series of red arrows into the blue and black forces of tradition. Although on a philosophical level, theorists of Cubism and Futurism each exaggerated their distinctiveness, in practice Italian and French artists learned enormously from one another—art historians talk, for instance, of “Cubo-Futurism.”¹² Cubist painters such as Fernand Léger were influenced by Futurist abstraction, while Futurists such as Boccioni used the fragmentary techniques of the Cubists to capture the motion of a crowd or a locomotive.

These swirling artistic currents that we now clinically label Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism were all part of an international ferment in European art during the decade before 1914. They were, however, currents that barely touched English shores. Edwardian art was intensely conservative, dominated by traditional portrait painters such as Augustus John and William Orpen, and the big 1905 show of some three hundred French impressionist paintings was a flop. It was only when the critic Roger Fry mounted two big shows of post-Impressionists in 1910 and 1912 that the British art world became seriously acquainted first with Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cézanne and then with Picasso and Matisse. “The combined effect of both events,” observes art historian Frances Spalding, “meant that a London audience had to catch up, in the space of two years, with artistic developments that had taken place in France over the last thirty.” But the response of critics and the public was generally negative. The author Wilfrid Scawen Blunt found no “trace of sense or skill or taste” in the paintings, “nothing but the gross puerility which scrawls indecencies on the walls of a privy.”¹³

When the Futurists hit London, reactions were even more hostile. Marinetti’s June 1914 manifesto on “Vital English Art”—in which he tried to enlist radical young London artists in the Futurist cause—succeeded only in provoking a backlash from the so-called Vorticists led by Percy Wyndham Lewis, a thirty-two-year-old rebel painter and writer, well versed in continental art. Tall and dashing, with dark eyes and a clipped mustache, Lewis had charisma, brains, and a talent for polemic. He turned Marinetti’s methods on the master with his own Vorticist manifesto cum journal Blast (published in lurid pink) which “blasted” pet cultural and artistic hates in a strident, billboard style. Like the other “isms,” the term Vorticism was contrived and vague—it originated from the poet Ezra Pound, who celebrated England as a great vortex “from which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing.” Such vagueness allowed Lewis to embrace aspects of all recent continental movements and attack traditionalist features of English culture—“We must kill John Bull with art”—while also claiming Vorticism had a distinctively national ethos—controlled, individualistic and “Anglo-Saxon”—unlike the emotional “Latins” with their “Futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, etc.”¹⁴

Lewis published the Vorticist manifesto in the first issue of Blast in July 1914. Unlike the continental experience, modernist art was only just getting going in Britain before the Great War. But it would find its moment and its subject in the ensuing conflict, again in contrast with the rest of Europe.

The continental avant-garde movements lost much of their force and vitality once war broke out. The art market collapsed in 1914–15 and artistic circles broke apart as painters joined up in the patriotic fervor. Some did not return—Franz Marc and August Macke among the German Expressionists, likewise the Futurists Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia. Georges Braque was shot in the head and only just survived.

In Germany the world of culture had always been tightly censored, with the kaiser seeing himself as the upholder of traditional artistic values. “The supreme task of our cultural effort is to foster our ideals,” he declared in 1901. “That can be done only if art holds out its hands to raise the people up, instead of descending into the gutter.” In wartime, German conservatives mounted a campaign against avant-garde art with a French or Italian taint but, after the carnage of Verdun and the Somme, Expressionists gave vent to their growing disillusion. “Either you are a painter and you shit on the whole caboodle,” wrote Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, “or you join in and kiss painting goodbye.” In fact he, like many of those who had joined in, fell apart amid the horrors of war and became unable either to fight or to paint. Otto Dix, whose nerves and hand remained steady, was a rare exception, sending home several hundred sketches from the front. After the war Dix, like other German Expressionists such as George Grosz, turned to political art drawing on Dadaist techniques of ridicule to dramatize the revolutionary upheavals of 1918–19. But then Dix returned to his wartime sketches, in Der Krieg (1924), a series of fifty etchings depicting the degradations of the front, where men are reduced to the level of animals (plate 10), and in Schützengraben (Trench)—a revolting pile of brains, guts, blood and excrement, with a decaying corpse impaled at the top. This canvas was probably destroyed in the Nazi era, but Dix reworked it for his triptych Der Krieg (1932), which has survived. In the postwar art of Dix, Max Beckmann, and other disillusioned veterans, the cruelty of war is depicted with an almost obscene candor, unmatched in France or Britain—not just in gross depictions of the dead and dying but also in frequent pictures of war cripples.¹⁵

In France some three thousand men and women, many of them professional artists, spent the war in the camouflage division of the Army using Cubist techniques to “de-form” guns, observation posts, and other military objects. Hence Picasso’s remark to Gertrude Stein as they watched a camouflaged cannon trundling down the boulevard Raspail: “C’est nous qui avons fait ça.” The jingoistic fervor of wartime also called into question artistic modernism. French conservatives attacked “Kubisme,” insinuating it was a form of “boche art,” so artists reached back to the classical past for a style that suited propaganda claims about France as a bastion of “Latin” civilization against German barbarism. Thus Picasso—a Spaniard and therefore exempt from French military service though a resident of Paris—displayed a new interest in painters such as Ingres and Poussin and in the Harlequin figure of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Picasso was already moving on from his prewar experiments with Cubism, but the “return to order” demanded by wartime opinion guided the next phase of his artistic odyssey.¹⁶

Aside from public pressures, artists across continental Europe had a real problem in conveying the visual horrors of the Great War. Images of the front were provided by photographs and film and these were vivid, often shocking, despite government censorship especially of their own country’s dead and wounded. Artists struggled to match the effect, or to reveal something strikingly different. Highly abstract techniques were inappropriate to show what war actually did to human bodies and the natural landscape, so even exponents of extreme abstraction such as Kandinsky and Marc Chagall brought recognizable people, buildings, and trees into their pictures. Most artists really struggled to find a style that seemed suited to modern war in a photographic age and this was another reason why most of them—with exceptions such as Dix in Germany or Léger in France—shied away from the war as a subject.

In the middle of the conflict most belligerent countries experienced a renaissance in the art market and a surge in museum attendance. But the public turned to paintings not to see vistas of war but to escape from them, craving soothing subjects and conventional styles. One Polish refugee in Russia burst into tears before a beautiful landscape in an exhibition. “Blood, blood, everywhere,” she cried, “but here it is so nice!” If people desired war-related art it was in the form of painting that helped them to mourn or evoked the mystery of mortality—hence the renewed appeal of religious themes. In Russia, Natalia Goncharova, previously an ardent Cubo-Futurist, drew on Byzantine religious art for her 1914 series of lithographs “Mystical Images of War,” in which angels mingled with airplanes.¹⁷

Neither did most governments make a big effort to promote war art, perhaps because of their concentration on film, photos, and posters. The US Army sent eight war artists to Europe in 1918 but most were magazine and book illustrators by background, and that showed. Harvey Dunn, in his youth a burly farm boy from South Dakota, was unusual in producing art that seemed emotionally engaged with the travails of the individual soldier and the horrors of the Western Front. Dunn’s output amounted to fewer than thirty finished pieces, each taking a huge emotional toll, but he managed to “capture the feeling of war with exceptional quality.” Most of the American war art, however, was descriptive rather than evocative, often charcoal or crayon drawings rather than full-size paintings, and they totaled only five hundred pieces.¹⁸

In France there was a larger art scheme. Les peintres en mission aux armées were supposed to “seize the atmosphere of the front” and “grasp what is happening with sensitivity, with emotion.” But although eight teams of official artists were at work in 1916 and 1917, the works they produced seemed remote and traditional—formal images of camps and transports, of prisoners, ruins, and empty landscapes. There were few close-ups of troops in peril, of explosions and shelling, and little sense of the frenzy of modern conflict because the painters were not allowed near the front line. One critic was reminded of “those hurried travellers who, guidebook in hand, visit a foreign country without having the time to penetrate it deeply enough to understand it.”¹⁹

In reality France’s supreme artistic memorial to the war was Les Nymphéas, eight elongated panels of water lilies that Claude Monet, the great survivor of the Impressionist generation, had labored on reclusively since 1914 while his son fought at the front. On the day after the armistice, Monet presented the work to the French nation. Clemenceau, an old friend and himself an art critic, arranged for the panels to be displayed in two special rooms in the Orangerie in Paris—what one commentator called “the Sistine Chapel of Impressionism.” Monet’s memorial of peace is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to what French historian Philippe Dagen has called “the silence of the painters” about the Great War.²⁰

In Britain and its empire, however, the story is very different because modern artists did face up to modern war; indeed, large numbers were paid to do so by the state. In the 1920s and 1930s the “most significant and important collection of modern British art in the country” was to be found in the Imperial War Museum, established in 1919, whose holdings were superior to those of the Tate Gallery, founded more than twenty years before. The museum held more than three thousand works of art, many of them commissioned by the government as part of a “deliberate exercise in creating a public for avant-garde works and managing the avant-garde for public use.”²¹

In Britain, as on the Continent, the early months of the conflict had seen a patriotic backlash against the avant-garde. In March 1915, The Times damned a recent exhibit of works by Wyndham Lewis, William Roberts, and other Vorticists as “Junkerism in Art.” These paintings, declared the paper’s art critic, were essentially “Prussian” in spirit, executing “a kind of goose-step” rather than painting “naturally.” Another critic even hoped that the Vorticists might “all perish in the war.”²² Some did indeed perish, including the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, while others such as Roberts and David Bomberg joined up under the pressure of patriotic expectations and in order to make a living after the collapse of the art market. Like artistic circles on the Continent, the Vorticists were dispersed by war: the second and final issue of Blast appeared in July 1915.

What saved the artists was war propaganda—or more exactly the peculiar British conception of war propaganda in 1914–18, formed out of a compromise between War Office secrecy and Liberal openness. Here the key figure was the politician Charles Masterman, who headed Wellington House, the government’s clandestine bureau for war propaganda. Easily underestimated because of his boyish looks and sloppy dress, Masterman was actually a brilliant intellect and a superb Whitehall fixer. “He knew little about art, but he had infinite experience of exploiting the talents of others; official war art in its early stages was entirely a product of his readiness to experiment.”²³

The British military stood out among the belligerents for its obsessive secrecy. Until mid-1916 there had been no official photographers in France: the few images of the British in France in 1914 and 1915 came from surreptitious snapshots by soldiers using their own cameras. Only the need to build up domestic support for the great offensive on the Somme forced Haig’s staff to appoint two official photographers for the Western Front—reasoning, in the words of intelligence chief Gen. John Charteris, that “he who lives by the river must make friends with the crocodile.” During the whole war British official photographers produced only 40,000 negatives, 28,000 of them from the Western Front. By contrast, the French Army created a section photographique as early as April 1915, with a staff of more than one hundred, backed by mobile laboratories, which produced over 150,000 plates during the war. Similarly the German Army’s Picture and Film Bureau (Bild- und Filmamt) had generated 200,000 slides and 30,000 negatives by 1917.²⁴

The War Office and the Admiralty had an equally obstructive attitude toward filmmakers. Masterman wanted to promote the British war effort both abroad and at home through good motion pictures, but the service chiefs were convinced that this would expose vital secrets. Many in Whitehall also viewed the cinema as an even more vulgar version of the music hall. The first film Britain Prepared was not launched until Christmas 1915, by which time German propaganda was being screened all over the world. “Wake Up, England,” warned one film magazine, claiming that Germany had developed “a practical monopoly of the cinema as a means of instructing public opinion.” ²⁵

By early 1916, Britain was lagging behind the enemy in both war photos and film, but this visual void was partly filled by the war art program. Its origins appear to lie in a chance conversation between one of the Wellington House staff and Muirhead Bone, a well-known etcher, who mentioned that he was about to be called up by the Army. That seemed a waste of Bone’s talents and the issue was brought to Masterman’s attention. Not being much interested in art himself, he asked his wife: “Do you know anything about an artist called Muirhead Bone?” She replied, as she recalled later, “with some heat,” reminding her husband that one of Bone’s etchings was hanging on their wall. And so in mid-August 1916 Bone arrived in France as an honorary second lieutenant equipped with chauffeur-driven car and a brief to depict the Western Front. War artists, unlike photographers and filmmakers, were part of British Army tradition, and Bone was a conventional artist: his appointment was approved at the very top by Haig himself. Bone’s meticulous but bloodless charcoal drawings, with accompanying text, were reproduced in a series of bestselling pocket books entitled The Western Front. This was a sanitized view of the front, a “travelogue composed by an uninvolved spectator,” but Bone paved the way for the appointment of young modernists such as C. R.W. (Richard) Nevinson and Paul Nash, as well as society portraitists like William Orpen. Crucially these artists were under little constraint. Nevinson once asked whether there was any subject he should avoid. “No, no,” replied Masterman with a wave of his hand. “Paint anything you like.”²⁶

It is worth dwelling on that remark for a moment because it reflects Masterman’s creed as a Liberal. His philosophy for British propaganda was “the presentation of facts and of general arguments based upon those facts.” Man was assumed to be an essentially rational animal, persuaded by arguments not swayed by emotions. German propaganda, by contrast, was directly controlled by the military, under the draconian “Law of Siege,” which largely overrode the civil power. The Army leaders, contemptuous of politicians and suspicious of the masses, displayed what has been called “a crucial failure to understand or to trust the home front,” which contributed to Germany’s eventual collapse in 1918.²⁷ Trusting the home front was, of course, hard for elites in all the belligerent countries: as the war went on a greater degree of compulsion was applied and, like others from his party (for instance on the issue of conscription), Masterman struggled to relate his Liberal values to the exigencies of total war. His answer was partly the conventional one that German barbarism, exemplified by Louvain, Reims, and the Lusitania, imperiled the ideals of liberty and civilization. But Masterman also wanted the means to reflect those ends, otherwise Britain would have abandoned the very values for which it claimed to be fighting: hence his preference for factually based propaganda and considerable artistic freedom.²⁸

Masterman got the war art program going, but its great impresario was the press tycoon Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. “The Beaver” was a dynamic and unscrupulous Canadian businessman who moved to Britain in 1910 and rapidly established himself in politics as a close ally of Bonar Law and then Lloyd George. Biographer A. J. P. Taylor reckoned that his character remained “the one he was born with—a clever restless little boy always up to mischief,” as his impish face suggested. In February 1918, Beaverbrook was given charge of a full-scale Ministry of Information, whose priority was up-to-date news via wireless and cable, plus films and photographs. Traditional forms of propaganda seemed outmoded and the withdrawal of all war artists from France in March 1918 because of the German offensive could easily have heralded the end of the whole scheme. Instead war art flourished as never before in the last months of the conflict—not as liberal propaganda (Masterman’s original brief) but because Beaverbrook wanted paintings to record and memorialize the war. He had already pioneered a scheme for the Canadian Army and now sought to replicate this on a larger scale. Almost his first act as Minister of Information was to create a British War Memorials Committee (BWMC), which included Masterman and the writer Arnold Bennett. They drew up an ambitious and systematic program covering eight areas of the war both abroad and at home, including “Munitions” and “Clerical and Other Work by Women.” Guided by Muirhead Bone, the BWMC commissioned a wide range of artists, including the Vorticists Lewis and Roberts. Plans were also developed for a grand Hall of Remembrance to epitomize the nation’s sacrifice, possibly in Whitehall itself, graced with a special series of grand “super-pictures” featuring the Western Front.²⁹

The BWMC has been described by its historian Sue Malvern as “the most ambitious” twentieth-century British program of “state patronage to commission modern history paintings.” Certainly it would have been impossible outside the context of total war and the concomitant government direction. Yet to call the scheme “state patronage” is to slide over the distinctive liberalism of British politics and society—so very different from the militarized statism of the Kaiserreich—which a buccaneering individualist such as Beaverbrook could exploit. His war art schemes for Canada and Britain showed, in the words of historian Maria Tippett, “the kind of personal and ad hoc organization that could be assembled by a hard driving entrepreneur of means and connections.” Beaverbrook even created a legally dubious charity to keep the project going after the Ministry was wound up, in order to leave “a legacy for posterity.” Unlike the classically heroic battle paintings of the past, executed academically in the studio, the canvases had to be “based on personal experience,” captured while “emotions and passions and enthusiasms are at their highest,” with each artist enjoying the “fullest liberty to do whatever may best suit his temperament.”³⁰

The results of this licensed freedom was war art with a distinctively English character, rooted in earlier traditions of representation and landscapes but infused with the attitudes and techniques of modernism. For many young artists, the war commissions gave them both a subject and a vision that had been lacking before the war.

Wyndham Lewis, for instance, had spent six months as an artillery officer on the Western Front in 1917. Twenty years later he recalled his baptism by fire, “plunged immediately into the romance of battle,” by which he meant its emotional intoxication rather than any inherent beauty. “Yes, romance is the enemy of beauty. That hag, War, carries it every time over Helen of Troy.” This is why Lewis wrote, sardonically, “You must not miss a war, if one is going! You cannot afford to miss that experience.” Yet he might not have lived to capture the experience but for the war artists program, which pulled him away from the guns for the whole of 1918. His technique was now very different from prewar Vorticist abstraction. As he remarked later: “The geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. They were still as much present in my mind as ever, but submerged in the coloured vegetation, the flesh and blood, that is life.” He added that “those miles of hideous desert known as ‘the Line’ in Flanders and France presented me with a subject-matter so consonant with the austerity of that ‘abstract’ vision I had developed, that it was an easy transition.”³¹

Lewis’s abstracted vision of war was expressed in a series of paintings of artillerymen in action, most notably A Battery Shelled—a jarring blend of Vorticism and representation. Filling most of the canvas, a team of gunners frenziedly rush to feed their guns. Angular stick men, they seem like robots or even insects, serving the mechanized master. In the left foreground, however, three officers are depicted with somber realism. One of them watches the frenzy of the gunners, a second looks wearily down, pipe in hand, while a third (resembling Lewis himself) stares fixedly away from the action. How to interpret these onlookers has generated endless debate. Do they represent Lewis’s old Vorticist self in the face of a new world? Are they there to point up the tragedy of war, functioning almost as a Greek chorus? Is the divide between officers and men a reflection of the deeper existential rift, as Lewis saw it, between individualists and the crowd? Or, given his interest in the poet Matthew Arnold, is this perhaps an evocation of Culture versus Anarchy, Civilization against Chaos, Reason in the face of Lunacy? For, as he wrote later, “to obtain this parched, hollow, breathless desert you have to postulate madmen.”³²

The debate about how to interpret A Battery Shelled will never be resolved, but there is no dispute that the romance of war had aroused Lewis to artistic heights that he would never reach again. The same was true of Richard Nevinson, another product of the Slade School of Art in Bloomsbury—well trained in draftsmanship but seeking a style of his own. In 1914 he came out as a passionate disciple of Marinetti, pitting himself against Lewis in a juvenile confrontation, but several harrowing months with an ambulance unit in France in 1915 marked his coming of age as an artist as he found his subject and his style—like Lewis but in a very different way.

Nevinson’s idiosyncratic blend of Cubist simplification and Futurist energy produced several riveting paintings of troops in action, notably La Mitrailleuse (plate 11). This rendition of a team of French machine gunners frenziedly locked in place around their weapon against a sky etched with barbed wire was acclaimed by the poet Laurence Binyon as a haunting illustration of “a world of men enslaved to a terrible machine of their own making.” Art critics were virtually unanimous in agreement: “When war is no more,” wrote Lewis Hind, “this picture will stand, to the astonishment and shame of our descendants, as an example of what civilised man did to civilised man in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” La Mitrailleuse was modernist but not too abstract: soldiers on leave queued up for a view because in it they could recognize themselves. Later in the war Nevinson’s style shifted toward graphic realism as he closed in on soldiers in their fortitude or suffering, but one of his last war paintings, The Harvest of Battle, returned to the theme of troops in action, though this time not as a mechanized mass but as a ragged line of wounded trudging through a blasted quagmire of mud and bodies. Although based on a war photo, Nevinson gave the scene poetic depth by arranging the men in a huge ellipse, from right to left circling a belching gun—a symbol of what they and their generation could not escape.³³

“Harvest” was also an ironic title for other war paintings, for instance Orpen’s brightly colored depiction of three peasant women, one with a young baby, tending the earth—but earth that was replete with graves and barbed wire. The harvest theme picked up the pastoral landscape tradition, stretching back through Turner to Constable, in which English art was rooted. Its most accomplished practitioner among the war artists was Paul Nash, another Slade graduate who had struggled to find his own style before the war. Nash had long been obsessed by trees—seeing them, he said, “as tho[ugh] they were human beings”—but the pre-Raphaelite sentimentalism of his student days was blown to bits in 1917 when he encountered the landscape of the Western Front, initially as an infantry officer and then as a war artist. His first visit was in springtime. Like many painters he was intoxicated by the amazing shapes and colors—“wondrous ruinous forms . . . toast-rackety roofs and halves of houses here and there” among the “bright trees” and a riot of blooming flowers. “I believe I am happier in the trenches than anywhere out here,” he wrote home to his wife. “It sounds absurd, but life has a greater meaning here and a new zest, and beauty is more poignant.” But when Nash returned in November to the rain and mud of Passchendaele, he was transfixed by “the most frightful nightmare of a country more conceived by Dante or Poe than by nature” with “no glimmer of God’s hand” to be seen anywhere. “Sunrise and sunset are blasphemies,” he exclaimed, “they are mockeries to man.” The scene was gilded with the colors of hell: yellow stinking mud, shell holes filled with green-white water, black dying trees and unceasing shells that churned up the land into a graveyard. “I am no longer an artist interested and curious,” Nash declared. “I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”³⁴

On fire for art, Nash ventured into oils and applied to the traditions of landscape the new vocabulary of Cubism and Futurism—“geometric shapes, staccato movement, and fractured planes.” The Menin Road, like Nevinson’s Harvest of Battle, depicted the wasteland of the Western Front, but its focus was on the land, not the men. Nash exposed what art historian Paul Gough has called the “latent violence” filling the “void of war”—diverse zones of water, mud, pathways, and trees from which, on closer inspection, there were no ways of escape (plate 12).³⁵ Even starker is We Are Making a New World—in which a silver sun rises over clouds colored like dried blood to shed pale light on a lunar landscape of pummeled earth and limbless trees. Today that painting is one of the most iconic images of the Western Front; its title sounds bitingly ironic. Yet it is worth remembering that the picture was a piece of official art and that it first appeared, untitled, as the cover of an issue of British Artists at the Front, published by Country Life. In other words, as art historian Sue Malvern reminds us, what is now assumed to be an “anti-war image” was promulgated in 1917 as covert propaganda for the Allied cause. What we now see as a universal and abstract image of the horror of war, was offered to British people as a graphic evidence of Hunnish aggression in France and Belgium. They would view it knowing that England remained a green and pleasant land, yet also conscious that England could easily be ravaged like the Continent but for the blood sacrifice of the Tommies. Understood in this way the picture conveys a more positive meaning, that heroic British soldiers were indeed making a new world.³⁶

And so Nash was enabled to “fuse his early pastoral vision with the forces of modernity,” expressing “the full horror of the Great War.”³⁷ Nevinson developed in the opposite direction, tempering abstraction with a new sense of humanity, and Lewis followed a similar trajectory at a more intellectualized level. Many of the war artists, of course, did not come from the avant-garde; much of the scheme was conventionally representational, though often of fine quality. But even established artists felt moved to something special. The portrait painter John Singer Sargent was commissioned to produce the central “super-picture” for the proposed Hall of Remembrance. Being American by birth, he seemed ideal for a canvas depicting transatlantic cooperation, but the portly, aging celebrity from London struggled to find a suitable subject—so completely out of his depth on the front that he even wondered if the troops stopped fighting on Sundays. In the end Sargent came up with one of the most haunting images of the war, based on a scene witnessed near Arras in August 1918. It took him a year to turn his sketches into a twenty-foot picture showing a line of gassed and blindfolded soldiers processing from left to right along a road already strewn with men lying in agony on either side (plate 13). Like a classical frieze, the stricken walkers, viewed from slightly below against an ochre sky, seem statuesque, bearing themselves with dignity. Although devoid of modernist touches, Gassed is a searing vision of modern war. Yet it evokes not revulsion—one’s reaction to the brutalized Expressionism of Dix—but compassion. This was war art that drew you in rather than turning you off.

All this was, however, a brief phase. The Hall of Remembrance, the intended home for Gassed, was never built: that lavish project withered away amid peacetime austerity. There was also a backlash against modernist war paintings: when some of them were shown at the Royal Academy in 1919, the popular press screamed about “Bolshevism in art” and “heroes made to look like clowns.” A critic for the Daily Mirror said he now knew what people meant by “the horrors of war,” adding, “it’s the pictures.”³⁸ In the 1920s many modernists struggled to find a vision once the “romance of war” had gone. Nevinson toyed with various subjects and styles, more pundit than painter, while Lewis became in W. H. Auden’s words a “lonely old volcano of the right” belching pro-fascist eruptions. More successfully Paul Nash went back to scenes pastoral, with mystical depictions of the Kent marshes and the South Downs; his return to landscape was typical of English art and, in some ways, English culture as a whole in the 1920s and 1930s.³⁹ But the unique British oeuvre of war art—inspired by Masterman’s Liberal vision, sustained by Beaverbrook’s ego, and funded by Britain’s warfare state—eventually found its home in the new Imperial Museum. There it would provide a treasury of images for Britain’s changing perspectives on the Great War.

Although government funding for war art was strangled by postwar austerity, the 1920s did see a remarkable official program of commemorative architecture. All the belligerent countries faced the challenge of coping with mass death on a scale not seen in any previous European wars, and the result was a vast network of battlefield cemeteries, especially along the old Western Front. But, as with war art, the British response was distinctive.

The armistice on November 11, 1918, though widely and often wildly celebrated across Britain, was officially only a ceasefire. Formal celebrations of peace had to await the signature of the Treaty of Versailles the following June, which was marked in Britain by a special Peace Day on July 19, 1919. Its highpoint was a Victory March through London; at Lloyd George’s insistence this centered on a “catafalque” in the middle of Whitehall, where troops would salute the memory of the dead. This was put together in a couple of weeks in wood and plaster by the distinguished architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, who proposed the name “cenotaph” or empty tomb. To the surprise of the government, the edifice proved a huge success, featured in press photos surrounded by floral wreaths. The Times led a chorus that this “simple, grave and beautiful” design should be “retained in more permanent form” and by the end of July the cabinet commissioned Lutyens to re-create it in stone. At this time there was no intention of marking the anniversary of the armistice on November 11, 1919. It was only on November 5 that the cabinet agreed to a proposal for a national two-minute silence—based on the South African practice of observing a “Three Minutes Pause” at noon each day during the war to recall the soldiers, living and dead. The silence on Armistice Day had a huge impact across the country; in London Lutyens’s temporary cenotaph, which had been left in place by popular demand, became the focal point for tributes headed by the king.⁴⁰

A year later on November 11, 1920, George V duly unveiled the new stone Cenotaph and stood there for the Two-Minute Silence. He then proceeded to Westminster Abbey for the formal interment of an “Unknown Warrior of the Great War,” chosen at random from four bodies exhumed on the Western Front, and now reburied with full honors in the nave. Although the remains were probably those of a regular soldier from 1914, they could theoretically have been those of anyone’s relative: hence the symbolic appeal of the tomb. Since it represented the dead of the whole empire, the British government resisted demands to build similar memorials in Commonwealth countries.

Britain’s memorialization was not unique. France erected its own monument to the Unknown Soldier on Armistice Day 1920; the Americans followed suit in 1921. And the Cenotaph in London was adapted from a temporary catafalque designed for victory celebrations in Paris on quatorze juillet in 1919. But the idea never caught on in France, whereas it became absolutely central for the British. The permanent structure was even more popular than the original: within a week 1.25 million people had passed by and the memorial was ten feet deep in flowers.⁴¹ Its appeal was partly testament to the artistry of Lutyens’s design—a blend of classical and modernist, reverential yet secular—using the principle of entasis so that apparently straight sides are actually the gentlest of curves. On to its graceful, blank public space millions of men and women could project their own private feelings. But there was a deeper reason for the Cenotaph’s popular appeal. Apart from the token grave in Westminster Abbey, Whitehall’s empty tomb would be the repository of the nation’s grief because Britain’s war dead would lie forever in foreign fields.

The British government had decided early in the war that the soldiers should be buried near where they had fallen: the cost of bringing home all the bodies, even where found and identified, would have been prohibitive. The French government initially adopted a similar position but then relented in 1920 because of popular outcry: eventually about 30 percent of France’s identified war dead (240,000 bodies) were reinterred in family vaults. Most of the remainder, who had died fighting to defend their homeland, were buried on French soil. The Germans, like the British, were not in a position to bring home most of their dead but, given their political and financial crisis in the early 1920s, architectural memorialization was understated and interment was often in large graves. The dead were honored as fallen heroes rather than citizen soldiers and buried in dark “heroes’ groves” (Heldenhaine) surrounded by “Teutonic” oak trees. The French and Germans did erect commemorative monuments—the grisly Art Deco Ossuary at Verdun, for instance, or the Stonehenge-style Tannenberg Memorial—but the British were unique in the money, artistry and emotion lavished on the architecture of their war memorials along the Western Front.⁴²

The British program was defined by the vision and energy of Fabian Ware, a former educator and journalist who had also been an administrator in South Africa—so he had both a sense of the public and also a feeling for the empire. Aged forty-five when war broke out and too old to serve, Ware volunteered as an ambulance driver in France, where he was appalled at the random carnage and became determined to register and memorialize soldiers’ graves. A fluent French speaker, by mid-1915 he had persuaded the French government to donate land for the burial of Allied soldiers. A couple of years later the British government accepted his proposals for a permanent body—like the War Museum, empire-wide rather than merely British—to tend these graves after the war, and the Imperial War Graves Commission received its royal charter in May 1917. The IWGC faced challenges unprecedented in the long history of Britain’s wars. Not only the scale of the killing—by the end of the war the empire’s dead exceeded one million—but also very different attitudes to the bodies of the war dead in a democratic age.⁴³

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, after the battle of Agincourt is over, the French herald asks leave to

. . . wander o’er this bloody field.

To book our dead, and then to bury them

And especially

To sort our nobles from our common men

In Henry VI, Part One, after the tables have been turned by Joan of Arc, it is an English knight who asks the French

Give me their bodies, that I may bear them hence,

And give them burial as beseems their worth.⁴⁴

This Shakespearean idea of burying bodies according to their “worth” remained the norm in later wars. After Waterloo in 1815, when 15,000 British soldiers died, most of the officers were transported home for family burial, while the corpses of private soldiers were dumped in mass graves. Not until 1890, after a public subscription campaign initiated by Queen Victoria, was a special monument erected at the Evere Cemetery in Brussels. Underneath were reinterred the remains of seventeen bodies from the field of Waterloo, most of them senior officers.

A hundred years later, after the Great War, Ware and his colleagues adopted a very different position. They stuck to the government’s decision that no bodies should be repatriated, even for the rich who could afford to pay, despite sustained pressure from relatives. “Many thousands of Mothers and Wives are slowly dying for want of the Grave of their loved ones to visit and tend themselves,” one petition informed the queen, “and we feel deeply hurt that the right granted to other countries is denied us.” But the IWGC decided that each body should have its own grave and that there should be no distinction “between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries in the form or nature of the memorials.” Otherwise, Ware explained in a press statement, “costly monuments put up by the well-to-do over their dead would contrast unkindly with those humbler ones which would be all that poorer folk could afford.” Instead “in death, all, from General to Private, of whatever race or creed, should receive equal honour under a memorial which should be the common symbol of their comradeship and of the cause for which they died.” As to the form of the gravestone, the commission also took a firm line, insisting on a plain and uniform headstone rather than a Christian cross. This suited the empire’s religious diversity and would be more durable against the elements. A headstone also allowed extra room for name, rank, regiment, and date of death, plus a short inscription supplied by next-of-kin—though the wording would be checked to avoid allowing “free scope for the effusions of the mortuary mason, the sentimental versifier, or the crank.”⁴⁵

The commission’s “tyranny” aroused a storm of protest. The sculptor Eric Gill deplored the idea of half a million standardized headstones as a “Prussian” imposition, championing “uniform mediocrity” over individual craftsmanship. One mother expressed horror that “tombstones should resemble so many milestones.”⁴⁶ Disquiet was also expressed in the Church of England and in Parliament, led by senior politicians such as Balfour, Lansdowne, and Robert Cecil, who forced a debate in the Commons on May 4, 1920. Feelings ran high on both sides. An MP defending the commission quoted a letter from a bereaved father. “Our boy was missing at Loos. The ground is of course battered and mined past all hope of any trace being recovered. I wish some of the people who are making this trouble realise how more than fortunate they are to have a name on a headstone in a named place.” The author of that letter was Rudyard Kipling—the populist bard of empire who had banged the drum for volunteering in 1914 and even pulled strings so that his only son, Jack, was commissioned as an officer despite very poor sight. Kipling’s grief and guilt at Jack’s death is perhaps expressed in one of his sardonic Epitaphs of War: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Jack’s body was never definitively identified and Kipling sublimated his personal anguish in national commemoration.⁴⁷

But others were not content to do so. Cecil insisted, for the opposition, that “the object of a tombstone is really a memorial to the individual.” In peacetime those “nearest and closest to the deceased” were naturally left to decide; so why, he asked, should it be any different in war? “Right through the Graves Commission,” fumed Cecil, “is the conception of a national monument” which was “an entirely novel idea. It has never been done before in the world’s history . . . It has never been said that the State has a right to turn the individual memorials to individual persons into a national memorial against the will and against the desire of their relatives.”⁴⁸

But Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war, endorsed the commission’s ambition to make the war cemeteries into an enduring national memorial. “It is little enough, but that is the least we can do. We can give these soldiers who have perished in the War memorials which will last for hundreds of years.” In that way, Churchill declared, their relatives would find some consolation to know that even “the humblest soldier who has fallen” would be remembered by name, regiment, and place of death “through periods so remote that probably all the other memorials of this time will have faded and vanished away.” Enduring memory of a sort previously possible only for monarchs and aristocrats, immortalized in stone within great cathedrals.⁴⁹

Cecil objected to what he regarded as the statism of the project, overriding the cherished principle of individualism. But what really animated Ware was the spirit of democracy. He and his supporters had grasped the new, democratic mood in both the Army and the country, which found expression in the 1918 franchise reform act.⁵⁰ The soldiers who survived would now have the right to vote, their opinions weighed equally with those of any gentleman. So the soldiers who did not return should at least share a similar equality, and recognition in death by naming was essential to that dignification. Hence the immense efforts undertaken to record even the missing. At Ypres thousands of British Empire soldiers had marched east through the Menin Gate, many of them never to return. Like much of the city, it was devastated during the war, but inside the arches of the rebuilt gate, opened in 1927, were engraved the names of 55,000 soldiers of the British Empire from the Ypres salient who had no known graves. Again there were critics: the poet Siegfried Sassoon denounced “these intolerably nameless names” of “the unheroic Dead” who had simply “fed the guns.” He called the New Menin Gate nothing less than a “sepulchre of crime.”⁵¹

But the commission pressed on. Even more ambitious was its Memorial to the Missing of the Somme on the Thiepval Ridge, where so many soldiers of Britain and the empire had died in 1916. This towering edifice in stone and pink brick, visible for miles around, was dedicated in 1932. It had been designed by Lutyens, like the Cenotaph, in a mysterious blend of ancient and modern. And he again employed a complex geometry, this time a network of interwoven arches on whose inner faces some 72,000 names were carved. Below the memorial down the hill was a cemetery containing the remains of 300 French soldiers and 300 British, mostly unidentified, soldiers. The joint burial was intended to symbolize the Entente Cordiale but visually it demonstrated the contrasting forms of national memorialization. French graves were marked with crosses that bore the stark, almost shocking word “Inconnu,” whereas the British headstones included what details could be gleaned about rank, regiment, and date of death, plus the words “Known unto God.” This phrase for the headstone was proposed by Kipling, who worked closely and indefatigably for the Commission, and it was he who also suggested the quotation “Their Name Liveth for Evermore” from Ecclesiasticus for the Stone of Remembrance in each cemetery. The stone was designed by Lutyens in a form suggestive of an altar yet also abstract and nondenominational—another example of the IWGC’s evasive engagement with official Christianity.⁵²

Attitudes toward naming were, however, different for non-white soldiers in Britain’s armed forces. On the assumption that most African troops were pagan and had not reached “the stage of civilisation,” they were not usually commemorated through individual graves and naming. This policy was also adopted for the more highly regarded troops of the Indian Army, including monotheistic Muslims. A particularly poignant example was the British Empire war memorial at Basra—an elegant colonnade in memory of some 40,000 missing from the Mesopotamia campaign, built on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway.^* Basra was no Thiepval. The memorial listed by name some 8,000 British soldiers; likewise the names of 665 Indian officers. But 33,222 Indian “other ranks” were recorded merely as the number of men lost by each military unit. For the most part, Britain’s non-white soldiers from the Great War were memorialized namelessly, “as beseems their worth,” in an age when only whites were generally deemed safe for democracy.⁵³

The democratic obsession with names and naming perhaps owes something to the example of the United States. Not so much from 1917–18, because fewer than 30 percent of America’s war dead were interred in foreign fields. Many relatives brought the bodies home; in any case more than half of America’s 116,000 official service deaths actually occurred from the influenza epidemic that ravaged the United States in 1918.⁵⁴ The real trailblazer for commemorating democratic death was the Civil War of 1861–65, America’s Great War. Forty percent of the Northern dead and a far higher proportion of Confederates perished anonymously—identified only by what the poet Walt Whitman called “the significant word UNKNOWN.” But later in the war the North made a real effort to collect and dignify some of its dead in national cemeteries. Of these the most important was Gettysburg, partly because of its size but also because of the intent behind it. Each grave was given equal status, not privileged by army rank or social status, and this principle was affirmed in President Abraham Lincoln’s address at the cemetery’s formal opening in November 1863. In a mere 272 words, little noted at the time but soon gaining rhetorical immortality, Lincoln ennobled the grisly business of industrialized killing, urging his countrymen to complete the “unfinished work” that “these honored dead” had begun so that “the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”⁵⁵

Lincoln’s example as a war leader, principled yet pragmatic, was much invoked in Britain during the Great War, not least by Lloyd George, and a replica of the famous Saint-Gaudens statue of the president was unveiled in Parliament Square in 1920. The Gettysburg mode of commemoration was also cited with approval: one journalist in 1916, even before the Somme, noted that America had “made stately pleasances of meditation in some of the scenes of her Civil War—places still haunted by the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg oration, the noblest of all modern valedictories to the undying dead.”⁵⁶

Whatever the direct influence of Gettysburg on the Imperial War Graves Commission, its project was certainly in that mold—seeking to endow democratic death with nobility and meaning—but in the 1920s it did this on a far grander scale, with nearly a thousand architect-designed cemeteries and memorials running like a ribbon through Belgium and France—some of them on a truly lavish scale, like Tyne Cot, Vimy Ridge, and Thiepval. The total bill was £8.15 million, roughly double the cost of a single day’s shelling in the final weeks of the war. So burying was much cheaper than killing. But measured against the different fiscal arithmetic of peacetime, the IWGC’s work constituted the biggest government construction project of the 1920s, eclipsing the modern stations on the London Underground or the program of new telephone exchanges. By the early 1930s the cemeteries on the Western Front had become popular sites of what was called “pilgrimage,” including visits by school groups. Lutyens and his fellow architects had created what has been aptly dubbed “a populist and nationalist art form for a nation that was awestruck by what nationalism had done but which could not, and would not, forget it.” ⁵⁷

War art and war cemeteries were great official projects, funded by the British government. By contrast there was no official program of war poetry, and the poets we now revere are known for their deep skepticism about the war and officialdom. The fullest bibliography of individuals from the United Kingdom who published some form of poetry about the Great War in 1914–18 lists 2,225 names. Of these 532 (24 percent) were female and only 417 (19 percent) saw service in the armed forces or uniformed organizations.⁵⁸ Much of this verse was of indifferent literary quality but, in numerical terms, most of Britain’s poets of the war were civilians rather than combatants, with women outnumbering soldiers. Yet we now reserve the term “war poets” for a few celebrated soldiers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The latter were, moreover, atypical soldiers as well as unrepresentative poets, being young, unmarried officers sometimes uneasy about homosexual leanings and uncertain about their own courage—who often ended up with something of a martyr complex. “For God’s sake cheer up and write more optimistically,” Robert Graves rebuked Owen in December 1917: “the war’s not yet ended but a poet should have a spirit above wars.” The fact that Owen, Sassoon, and their ilk penned some of the most powerful antiwar poetry in modern literature should not blind us to their atypicality.⁵⁹

From a European perspective, English poetry, like art, was something of a backwater in the early twentieth century. The fascination for vers libre, evident in France for several decades, had barely touched Britain. One of its great promoters, the “democratic” American poet Walt Whitman, was little read in England despite being an Anglophile. English poetry seemed set in a dead husk of nineteenth-century Romanticism. The interaction of man and nature, explored with passionate intensity by Wordsworth and Keats, had been reduced by early twentieth-century poets such as Stephen Phillips to a cloying sentimentality that one critic likened to “pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table.” British debate about poetry took off in the very last years before the war, as part of the general ferment in the arts in continental Europe that belatedly hit Britain. “Slowly we have emerged from the nineteenth century,” declared the poet and artist Laurence Binyon in 1912. “We are breathing a different air. We are no longer fin de siècle. We are being changed, and the world with us.”⁶⁰

As with painting, the ferment produced various claustrophobic cliques, trying to define themselves against one another via grandiloquent manifestos. The so-called Imagists championed “hard,” direct, unadorned language and also free verse suited to the image that the poet sought to evoke. That seemed far better than shackling ideas to some mechanical meter, rather like “putting a child into armour,” to quote the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme. Much of their writing appeared in the journal The Egoist, which published Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, as well as serializing James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By 1914, Pound and Hulme had transferred allegiance to Wyndham Lewis, giving Vorticism in turn a philosophical patina.⁶¹

The other passionate reaction to Victorian poetry took the form of the Georgians, adopting the title of five volumes of Georgian Poetry published between 1912 and 1922. Their editor, Edward Marsh, civil servant and patron of the arts, was private secretary to Winston Churchill, which helped give his patronage political clout. In a preface to the first volume Marsh asserted that “English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty” and he predicted “another ‘Georgian period’ which may take rank in due time with the several poetic ages of the past.” The Georgians were hardly a tight-knit school—the first issue of Georgian Poetry included Rupert Brooke and D. H. Lawrence—but the Georgian revolt was another facet of the self-conscious reaction against supposedly moribund Victorianism in favor of art that was true to life’s raw vitality. “Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal,” insisted the critic John Middleton Murry, editor of another new journal Rhythm, which advocated painting and writing that was “the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch.” Ultimately, though, Georgians such as Lascelles Abercrombie were happier with conventional forms, particularly meter, and traditional themes, especially the world of nature: their aim was to revivify the Romantic heritage.⁶²

Although an enraged Pound did once challenge Abercrombie to a duel, the divide between Imagists and Georgians should not be exaggerated.⁶³ As with the “isms” of art—Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism—they should be understood not as rival schools but as different currents in the same swirling stream. In any case such distinctions were almost overwhelmed in a tidal wave of verse generated by the outbreak of the Great War.

This outpouring was not peculiar to Britain. At least three hundred volumes of poetry were published in wartime France; the German book trade catalog for 1915–19 listed more than one thousand entries under the category “World War: Poems” including six collections of “Inscriptions on Railway Carriages, Dug-Outs and the Like”—in other words, literary graffiti. And these collections represented only a fraction of the poems that appeared in the popular press. The explosion of poetry in Britain in 1914 (the Times was receiving more than a hundred verses a day in August) might have been larger in scale than in Germany but it was certainly not unique.⁶⁴

As in Germany, the bulk of British war poetry was patriotic, indeed propagandist. Today we recall with amusement a few trite utterances, such as Henry Newbolt’s public-school injunction to “play up, play up, and play the game,” or Rupert Brooke’s sententious sonnet “Peace” welcoming the coming of war:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping . . .

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping . . .

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.⁶⁵

Yet in fact, most of the poems published in Britain in 1914 and indeed throughout the war were strongly supportive of the national cause. Instead of “emotion recollected in tranquillity”—Wordsworth’s classic definition of poetry in his Lyrical Ballads—this was heat-of-the-moment stuff, mostly penned not by soldiers who had seen battle but by civilians reacting to war news in the daily papers. And that news was shaped by the stereotype of German brutality established in Belgium during the opening weeks of the conflict, so that “a deliberate campaign to vilify the enemy was quite unnecessary, since the public was already convinced.” Although not invaded like Belgium or France, England was, in the words of one poet, fighting “for the freedom of less favoured folk” and in order to keep the barbarous foe at bay from England itself. Although authors in all belligerent countries evoked images of their homeland, English poetry was extreme in its pastoralism, rooted in the heritage of Romanticism, which celebrated the peaceful beauty and seasonal verities of rural life—fields and flowers, hills and vales, sheep and horses, larks and nightingales, dawns and sunsets. The French evoked their homeland through villages, churches, and the values of civilisation; German writers also focused on their cultural heritage but often celebrated their cities and industry. Where English poets were unusual was in defining their country so intensely through its countryside.⁶⁶

“English” and “England” are definitely the right terms here. Much of this patriotic verse drew not simply on Romantic poets such as Keats and Shelley but also on the newly self-conscious canon of “English literature.” Responding to the cultural nationalism of late-nineteenth-century France and Germany, anthologies of the “best” and most typical English poets had been published in the late Victorian era—including Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English verse (beginning in 1861) and the Oxford Book of English Verse (from 1900) which had sold half a million copies in twenty reprints by 1939. Produced for a newly literate population and widely used in schools, these anthologies helped make literature, to quote professor and critic Stefan Collini, “one of the central symbolic expressions of the ‘imagined community’ of the English people.” By 1900 the geographical focus for English writers had shifted from the wild northern mountains of the Lake District, beloved by the Romantics, to the gentle rolling downs of Southern England, idealized in the writings of Hardy and Kipling. Here, supposedly, was where the country’s quiet quintessence could best be discerned. Across the centuries, of course, some of the most celebrated “English literature” has been written by non-Englishmen—one thinks of Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson or of Irish writers from Swift to Yeats. But the poetic explosion that fired British patriotism in 1914–18 drew predominantly on images of Englishness. Take, for instance, John Masefield in “August 1914”:

These homes, this valley spread below me here,

The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,

Have been the heartfelt things, past-speaking dear

To unknown generations of dead men . . .

These were men who had left England and, in Masefield’s words “died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands” because they loved the land of home. Masefield was folding the men of 1914 and their soldier ancestors into a unity formed by history and literature.⁶⁷

This canon defined the idiom of war poetry as much as its imagery. Most writers used four- or eight-line stanzas, rhyming alternately or in couplets, with a regular meter. They favored an archaic vocabulary full of adjectives like “bold,” “valiant,” “pure,” and “mighty,” extolling a war waged with swords and helmets, flags and drums. And they employed “elevated” language about the epic of battle, the glory of patriotic death and the immortality of fame, extending this genre now from classical warriors to mass armies. Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets of 1914 again set the tone—“Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!”—but he was only the most famous. It is now often said that such “high diction” was silenced by the Somme but there were plenty of critics earlier in the war, at home more than at the front. In August 1915 the Liberal weekly The Nation urged people to dig down “through all this mud of word-making and worship of phrases, to the bedrock facts of reality” about the war. The decline of patriotic verse from 1916 owes as much to the introduction of conscription as it does to the Somme: in 1914 and 1915 such poems were often intended to inspire volunteers to join up. And the rhetoric of 1914 was heard again in the spring of 1918, when the great German offensives toward the Channel generated a renewed sense of crisis.⁶⁸

Perhaps the most celebrated poet of the war, now totally forgotten, was John Oxenham, pen name of the novelist William Dunkerley, by then in his sixties. His collection of poems All’s Well, published in November 1915, had sold more than 200,000 copies by 1918 and his “Hymn for the Men at the Front” ran to more than seven million copies as a broadsheet. What made Oxenham so popular, writes critic Martin Stephen, was that he “does not seek to offer comfort by ignoring the reality of combat, but he offers that comfort despite it.” Oxenham tells readers, for instance, that a soldier “died unnoticed in the muddy trench” before affirming: “God was with him, and he did not blench.” Hardly great poetry, but clearly consolation for many. One of the most popular hymns later in the war was a poem by William Cowper, the eighteenth-century pastoralist, affirming the ultimate beneficence of divine providence: “God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform.”⁶⁹

Nowadays the most celebrated exposé of “real” war is Wilfred Owen’s 1917 poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In it Owen is haunted by the face of a soldier who failed to get his mask on in time: “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning,” as though “under a green sea.” If you could see that face, Owen tells his reader, if you could hear the blood “Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,” then

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.⁷⁰

Today Owen stands as the archetypal “war poet”—meaning a soldier poet who was antiwar—but, just as most of Britain’s war poets were actually civilians who supported the war, so much of Owen’s ire was directed against jingoistic rhetoric (“war words”), not the war itself. What’s more, like Siegfried Sassoon, whose savage satire greatly influenced Owen in the summer of 1917, Owen was not a pacifist but a courageous, sometimes reckless officer who won the Military Cross for killing Germans—a point that his brother Harold later tried to conceal because it did not fit Wilfred’s image in the 1960s as the supreme antiwar poet. Though anguished about the war, Owen concluded that his place was on the battlefield. This was partly from love of his men—“I came out in order to help these boys,” he wrote his mother not long before being killed in November 1918—but it also reflected his residual belief in what they were all fighting for.⁷¹

Consider a couple of examples of this belief. Owen’s famous draft preface for a future collection of poems insisted: “I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.” What he meant was that his book would not be “about heroes” or about “glory, honour, might, majesty,” and all the other grand words of the poetic vocabulary. All he could do was to “be truthful” about war, thereby arousing pity. But in a little-noted coda to the preface Owen expressed the hope that his book “survives Prussia.” He sometimes used “Prussia” to signify militarism in London as well as Berlin, but his basic anti-German thrust is clear. One catches it too in his poem “Exposure,” finished in France in September 1918 and now usually quoted to illustrate the misery of soldiers stuck in wind, rain, and ice. Owen uses pastoral imagery ironically to depict the tribulations of the men (“mad gusts” tugging on “brambles” of barbed wire, dawn’s “melancholy army” of rain attacking “in ranks on shivering ranks of grey”). But he also employs it to envision the verdant, peaceful England for which he eventually gave his life:

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;

Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.

For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid;

Therefore, not loath, we lie out here . . .

“Exposure” suggests that even in the last months of the war Owen still believed the struggle still had a point.⁷²

Other “war poets” shared Owen’s ambivalence about surface rhetoric and deeper meaning. Edward Thomas, for instance, whose December 1915 poem “This is no case of petty right or wrong” begins

. . . I hate not Germans, nor grow hot

With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.

But eventually he cries “God save England,” lest

We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.

The ages made her that made us from the dust:

She is all we know and live by, and we trust

She is good and must endure, loving her so:

And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.

Thomas, a Londoner born and bred, was passionate about the countryside. Although in his late thirties with wife and children, he decided not only to enlist but then to volunteer for overseas duty. Asked what he was fighting for, he bent down, crumbled some earth in his hand, and replied, “Literally, for this.” None of Thomas’s “war poems” dealt directly with war; instead they extol his homeland, its character and continuity, in lines made sharper by his sense of looming death.⁷³

For many during the Great War, both in Britain and at the front, the “civilization” for which they fought therefore boiled down to a profound if nebulous love of home, often expressed in pastoral idiom. This was true for poets like Thomas, just as it was for war artists such as Paul Nash. Man and nature ravaged in Flanders fields; man and nature in harmony in an idealized England—the war’s meaning lay somewhere in the gap.

Nature domesticated was also the central motif of British war cemeteries. Planting graves with flowers was strictly forbidden in German cemeteries: that was deemed a mark of sentimental Frenchified civilisation, whereas facing up to tragedy starkly was what distinguished German Kultur. Hence the dark stones and shadowed groves. British war cemeteries, on the other hand, were striking for their profusion of colorful flowers and shrubs, mostly native to England. Roses and pinks, beech and yew—the latter encouraged because of its “association with our own country churchyards.” An echo here of Brooke’s already famous lines:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England . . .^74*

The keenest criticism of the “Great War for Civilisation” came not from those within the pastoral tradition who wrote in wartime but writers looking back in the 1920s from a very different perspective, shaped by prewar Imagism. The real divide was not between Owen, a self-confessed Georgian, and Brooke—it is unlikely that the latter could have sustained the tone and form of the 1914 sonnets if he, like Owen, had soldiered on to 1917–18—but between both of them and the tradition pioneered by Ezra Pound.⁷⁵ Pound was an American who lived in London between 1908 and 1920. A would-be poet from an early age, his roots spread far more widely than English pastoralism. Pound knew the Romantics and the classics; he also immersed himself in French Symbolists like Baudelaire and in Asian literature. Indeed few poets have educated themselves so widely in the riches of world poetry. Pound advocated free verse, where rhythm and meter were adapted to the emotion the poem sought to convey rather than the other way around, and also “permanent metaphor,” using “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” The result was a hard, astringent style that proved ideal to express his bleak disillusion about the postwar world, notably in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (1920). Like Owen this attacked the supreme war words dulce et decorum est pro patria mori but went on to damn the whole idea of a war for civilization:

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilisation . . .

For two gross of broken statues,

For a few thousand battered books.⁷⁶

Pound also served as midwife to the great modernist long poem of the 1920s, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922). Eliot, like Pound, was American, widely read in French poetry. Unlike Pound he settled permanently in Britain, becoming studiously Anglicized and increasingly conservative. In contrast with both Pound and the Georgians, his immersion in English literature was Elizabethan and Jacobean rather than pastoral and Romantic. On and off since the start of the war Eliot had written various pieces, full of literary allusions, without finding an overarching unity. When he pulled the material together in the winter of 1921–22, with his nerves and his marriage falling apart, the theme that emerged was the decay of Western civilization caused by mass culture but accelerated by the war. Much of the poem was set in London:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

But the Bolshevik threat also lurked in his mind: “Who are those hooded hordes,” he asks, “swarming / Over endless plains”? The original version read “over Polish plains.” Eliot’s correspondence around this time shows his concern about the “fiasco” of Wilson’s “reorganisation of the nationalities” and the resulting “Balkanisation” of Europe. That mood is also evident in the poem:

Cracks and reforms and burst in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal.⁷⁷

Still uncertain about his sprawling draft, Eliot entrusted it to Pound, who cut away many of the allusions and excursions and brought out the underlying rhythms in a way that conformed to his own terse, hard definition of true poetry. “The Waste Land” remained a work of fragments but, as poet Stephen Spender observed, this became a virtue rather than a defect because “the poem is about a fragmented culture.” The recondite allusions to past literature themselves become cultural fragments—Pound’s “broken statues” from the ruins of the past. Eliot’s decaying civilization was urban and often sordid—a cityscape of trams and taxis, canals and gasworks, with no vestige of the pastoral. Nature appears mostly in the form of fertility myths and their debasement; suffering is not redeemed in an idealized landscape but endured with words of resignation from the Buddhist scriptures. The published edition of The Waste Land was something of a con: Eliot, like Pound, was keen to make his mark and the literary allusions were explained in footnotes that Eliot himself later called a “remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship.” But the sheen of erudition helped attract attention to the work, while Pound’s stern pen gave the text an abstract, “gnomic” quality: rather like Lutyens’s Cenotaph, this was a waste land that could be envisioned and inhabited as each reader desired. The poem quickly achieved cult status among young intellectuals.⁷⁸

After 1922, Pound and Eliot went their separate ways—Pound’s disillusion drawing him to Italy and fascism while Eliot stayed in England and eventually embraced what was called “Christian Civilisation.” But in the early 1920s they both wrote poetry about the Great War that was strikingly different in content as well as style from the Georgians and those who, like Owen and Thomas, were still rooted in that tradition. The poetic form that Eliot and Pound pioneered would define much of twentieth-century English poetry. The pastoral tradition had come to a dead end, rather like its poets. But in time that fate would enhance its attraction (and theirs) as emblems of a lost age.

Although Eliot’s and Pound’s poems were particularly vivid responses to the chaos after 1918, the future of civilization was intensely debated by intellectuals all through the 1920s. The classic statement was Oswald Spengler’s two volumes on Der Untergang des Abendlandes, published in 1922–23. A bestseller in Germany, the work appeared in English as The Decline of the West. Sales were not spectacular, but the title became popular shorthand for cultural pessimism. The Great War also forced Sigmund Freud to rethink his theory of the self: alongside the drive to procreate (Eros) he now postulated a drive to destroy (Thanatos). Developing these ideas in a book translated into English as Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud concluded that “the meaning of the evolution of civilization” had always been the struggle between “the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction.” But now, he warned, men have gained such control over the forces of nature that “they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.” In the next round of the struggle for civilization, Eros would again pit itself against Thanatos but, asked Freud ominously, “Who can foresee with what success and with what result?”⁷⁹

British authors struck a similar note. The Revolutions of Civilisation by the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, first published in 1911, familiarized many with the idea that civilizations rise and fall rather than constituting a narrative of sequential progress. The most famous British exemplar of this cyclical view was Arnold Toynbee. His ten-volume Study of History did not start to appear until 1934 and gained a wide readership only through an abridged edition after World War II, but Toynbee’s basic ideas were already widely known. Western civilization, he told radio listeners in 1931, was just another bubble in the stream of world history. “Isn’t it most probable that our bubble will burst like the rest?” ⁸⁰

In 1928 the art critic Clive Bell published a rather hackneyed treatise entitled Civilization. He justified his title on the grounds that “the story of this word’s rise to the highest place amongst British war aims is so curious.”⁸¹ By the late 1920s many skeptics offered a simple explanation—propaganda. Masterman’s discreet campaign to promote the British cause through well-placed articles and art and the more direct methods of Northcliffe and Beaverbrook had now become public knowledge through memoirs and exposés. Similar volumes appeared in France, Germany, and America, and social scientists began to reflect on the place of propaganda in a democratic world. Perhaps the most influential writer was Harold Lasswell, a precocious twenty-five-year-old professor at the University of Chicago, who reworked his doctoral dissertation as a book entitled Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927). For Lasswell, propaganda was “a concession to the rationality of the modern world” but, despite the veneer of civilization, it was really just an updated version of the tom-tom that aroused war lust among primitive tribes. In pithy prose he identified a series of general rules: “mobilize hatred against the enemy,” “preserve the friendship of allies,” “procure the co-operation of neutrals,” and “demoralize the enemy.” On most scores, he argued, the British were “amazingly successful” in 1914–18, whereas German propaganda was remarkable only for its “stupidity” and “maladroitness.”⁸²

For Lasswell propaganda had been the third “front” of Allied victory, alongside economic blockade and massive armies. And “the great generalissimo on the propaganda front was Wilson,” whose rhetoric “declared war on autocracies everywhere” while welding the American people, “sprung from many alien and antagonistic stocks,” into “a fighting whole.” It was Wilson who “brewed the subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people, until the smashing power of the Allied armies knocked them into submission.” And “the propaganda of disintegration which was directed against the tottering realm of the Hapsburgs bore fruit in disaffection and ultimate secession among the Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Croats, Poles and Italians.” All this was a rather swashbuckling version of the history of 1918, but Lasswell was more concerned with promoting propaganda (and himself). Readers were left with the impression that it was words that really won the war. Ten years on, Lasswell had turned Wilson the Idealist into Wilson the Propagandist—whose “matchless skill” in that role had “never been equalled in the world’s history.”⁸³

Lasswell’s academic cynicism dealt impassively with all the belligerents of 1914–18. But in practice, most of the late 1920s exposés of propaganda focused on the Allies. One of the most polemical was Falsehood in War-Time (1928) by Arthur Ponsonby. “International war,” he exclaimed, was “a monster born of hypocrisy, fed on falsehood, fattened on humbug,” and “directed to the death and torture of millions.” Although asserting that lying was a universal feature of war, he devoted only a few pages of the final chapter to German transgressions. Nearly all his book was taken up with indictments of the British government—for the web of secret treaties that, he argued, were the real reason for the conflict, for its claims of sole German war guilt, and for the exploitation of neutral Belgium and Germany’s alleged atrocities there so as to “colour the picture with the pigment of falsehood” and “excite popular indignation.”⁸⁴

Ponsonby was a pacifist, a leader of the antiwar Union of Democratic Control in 1914–18 who continued his campaign against the “monster” of war in the 1920s. Far from being an objective exposé of propaganda, Falsehood in War-Time was itself “a propaganda lie,” argues historian Adrian Gregory, “fabricated from contentious interpretation and downright invention” by a publicist “deeply sympathetic to Germany.” Some of the “atrocities” were indeed unfounded rumor, notably the story of the “crucified Canadian,” but the basic facts about German aggression and brutality in Belgium, accounting for the estimated quarter of a million deaths during the war, have been substantiated by subsequent research. Yet many people doubted this in the late 1920s.⁸⁵

Ponsonby’s “facts” were often gleaned from material produced by postwar German governments to discredit the “war guilt” clause of the Treaty of Versailles and justify revision of the peace settlement. This “massive and successful campaign of disinformation,” to quote historian Holger Herwig, was coordinated by a special “War Guilt Section” of the German Foreign Ministry but fronted by tractable scholars and ostensibly private academic bodies such as the Centre for the Study of the Causes of the War. The result was a forty-volume collection of documents from the German diplomatic archives, cherry-picked to show that Germany went to war in self-defense against mobilization by the despotic tsarist regime and its French ally. Published between 1922 and 1927, this oeuvre forced other governments, including Britain, to bring out their own selected documents but the Germans had got in first and in bulk, so that in the 1920s and 1930s most scholars of the origins of the Great War relied heavily on German materials. These served as the basis for the influential works of American revisionist historians such as Sidney B. Fay and Harry Elmer Barnes. The effect was to encourage a general belief, to quote Lloyd George’s memoirs, that “nobody wanted war” in 1914. The July crisis was, he claimed, a gigantic “muddle”: the nations “slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron,” they blindly “backed their machines over the precipice.” By the 1930s it seemed hard, even in Britain, to sustain the argument that Germany was straightforwardly guilty for the Great War. Most Germans certainly believed their official line that 1914 had been a defensive war. For them propaganda was something practiced by “the All-lies.”⁸⁶

The late 1920s was in general a moment ripe for reflection, being a decade since the armistice and Versailles. The books by Lasswell and Ponsonby were part of a rash of novels, memoirs, and studies that cast a more skeptical eye over the war for civilization. In Britain the most celebrated was Good-Bye to All That (1929) by the poet Robert Graves. Subtitled “an autobiography” but distinctly cavalier about factual accuracy, Graves’s version of wartime life attracted attention because of the breezy, matter-of-fact tone in which the trials of soldiering are related. “There was no patriotism in the trenches,” he told his readers. From the perspective of ten years on, Graves set wartime in a larger narrative that took him from a starched Victorian childhood to a promiscuous, bohemian present. This sense of a seismic rift in time was evident in other bestsellers such as Siegfried Sassoon’s fictionalized Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928). Most of his book evoked an idyllic prewar existence playing cricket and riding horses in rural Kent. Near the end, in the “cloudless” summer of 1914 under the “spellbound serenity of its hot blue skies,” Sassoon simply rides on into the yeomanry—out of that “life-learned landscape which, we all felt, was threatened by barbaric invasion” to confront the German soldiers who had “crucified” Belgian babies. “Stories of that kind were taken for granted: to have disbelieved them would have been unpatriotic.” By the last pages of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, however, Sassoon’s best friend is dead, his horse has gone, and he is sploshing around in the trenches of Flanders.⁸⁷

Virginia Woolf conveyed the sense of time passing in a different way in her modernist novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Its three sections follow the Ramsay family in their summer house on the island of Skye from 1910 to 1920. For most of the book there is no central narrator: the plot develops through the shifting perspectives of various people, while momentous events occur, literally, in brackets. That is how we learn of the sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay; likewise the demise of her son. “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]” Then the novel (and life) goes on. The war has been “parenthesized, contained as an interlude,” writes critic Vincent Sherry, yet the interlude is horrifically vast and leaves an irreparable sense of loss. Graves, Sassoon, and Woolf all portray 1914 as a great divide.⁸⁸

The most influential of these books from ten years on was Im Westen Nichts Neues by a young German veteran, Erich Maria Remarque, which was published in Germany in January 1929. The title, a formulaic phrase from German military dispatches, was translated as All Quiet on the Western Front, and that ironic cliché soon entered the English language. Through the eyes of Paul Bäumer, the book tells the story of “a generation of young men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.” With sympathy but not sentiment Remarque describes the small pleasures of a soldier’s life such as lice hunts and good latrines, their closeness as comrades and their growing alienation from family and home: “What is leave?—A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.” These are men who have become estranged from civilization, from life itself—“we are dead.” Caught in no-man’s-land, Paul frantically knifes a French soldier who has fallen into his shell hole but then has to watch for hours as the man gasps and gurgles his way to death. Overcome with remorse, he talks to the Frenchman and looks at photos and letters from his family. The enemy has become a human being: “I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval.” Paul vows that, if he survives, he will fight against the war that has struck down both of them: “I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen again.” But Paul himself is killed a few weeks before the armistice: “His face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”⁸⁹

All Quiet on the Western Front became an international bestseller. By May 1930 it had sold 2.5 million copies in twenty languages, including one million in Germany and over 300,000 in both Britain and America, and had extensive newspaper serialization. Hollywood naturally jumped on the bandwagon. The movie version made at Universal Studios and directed by Lewis Milestone began filming, quite deliberately, on Armistice Day 1929 (the head of Universal, Carl Laemmle, was a pacifist with a message to preach). When the film was released in April 1930, it made as big an impact as the book. Although banned in Nazi Germany and never screened in the Soviet Union, it proved a box-office hit in America, Britain, and most of the world. Lloyd George called it “the most outstanding war film I have ever seen.” Sydney Carroll in the Sunday Times said, “It brought the war back to me as nothing has ever done before since 1918.” The film revealed the basic humanity of the ordinary soldier—the German “enemy”—and also of his own enemy in that muddy death pit. Equally important, All Quiet on the Western Front was the first major “talkie” about the war. Not merely did this make it possible for audiences to hear actors speak sequences of moving dialogue rather than read them on the intertitles, the movie also conveyed the noise of battle in booming sound—hissing bullets, rattling machine guns, thunderous shells, and the screams of the wounded.⁹⁰

Here was a cultural shift of signal importance. The tenth-anniversary book boom is often cited as shaping public attitudes, but the movies reached a far wider audience and did so with much greater power. Richard Aldington, the Imagist poet and war veteran, observed sagely in 1926: “Those who have attempted to convey any real war experience sincerely, unsentimentally, avoiding ready-made attitudes (pseudo-heroic or pacifist or quasi-humorous), must have felt the torturing sense of . . . trying to communicate the incommunicable.”⁹¹ Some of the wartime footage started to bridge that gap, but sound movies did so with transcendent power. War no longer had to be imagined through words, or glimpsed from afar in still photographs; now it could be seen, heard, and almost felt. German and French filmmakers also evoked the trench warfare experience. Westfront 1918 (1930) followed four German lads to their death in what was literally a soldier’s-eye view of the war, shot claustrophobically from the trenches with no panoramas of the battlefield. Les Croix de Bois (1932) lacked some of the intense violence of All Quiet and Westfront, but it also evoked the horrors of battle, the camaraderie of the trenches, and the universality of death for French and Germans alike under the ubiquitous wooden crosses of the title. Les Croix de Bois was a rare exception to what has been called “the silence of the French cinema” as well as French painters about the tragedy of the Great War. These three classic movies from America, Germany, and France helped create an iconography of enduring images used recurrently in later films about the Great War: the subterranean world of the trenches, the night patrol caught in barbed wire, the ravaged landscape, and the omnipresent mud. The films also established a narrative pattern in which there are no protagonists let alone heroes, only a few young men fated to die, with the larger meaning of the conflict left unclear.⁹²

For Americans the Great War remained a distant conflict, played out “over there,” three thousand miles from home. Just as the New World and the Old World “fought different wars” in 1917–18, so in remembrance they drew different meanings from the conflict. The United States had no deep-rooted tradition of pastoral poetry, or even a firm poetic canon: The Oxford Book of American Verse did not appear till 1950.⁹³ Much of American literature has explored the country’s supposed polarization between the protean West and the cultivated East, with the rugged frontier as the great divide. Europe functioned as a sort of Far East—good or bad depending on one’s judgment of the basic East-West polarity. Many of America’s war novels fit this pattern. In Willa Cather’s Pulitzer prize–winning novel One of Ours (1922), Claude Wheeler, a farm boy from the lost frontier of Nebraska, finally finds fulfillment on the battlefields of France. A Son at the Front (1923) by Edith Wharton, an American exile in Paris, told a heroic story of a young man who finally breaks free of his aging parents to fight and die in Europe convinced that “if France went, western civilization went with her.”⁹⁴

Similarly, most American films about the war portrayed it as a great adventure story, with the US Army as redressers of European wrongs. The most famous, Sergeant York, was not made until 1941 but Gary Cooper’s portrayal of Alvin York, who won the Medal of Honor in October 1918 for eliminating a German machine-gun nest and taking 130 prisoners, brought alive a story that had been engraved in American folk memory since the early 1920s. York was a mountain boy from Tennessee, born in a log cabin, straightforward, religious but a brilliant shot, who did his duty and then returned home to marry his true love—in short, a classic American hero.⁹⁵ The few movies that sounded a more skeptical note addressed the experience of other nations—Germany, France, and Britain. America’s own involvement and the motives behind it “went almost unquestioned by the country’s motion picture industry,” writes historian Michael Isenberg. “The awful harvest of war, in this view, was reaped legitimately by those nations that had begun the whole thing in 1914.”⁹⁶

One example was A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1929 and made into a movie starring Gary Cooper in 1932. Loosely based on Hemingway’s own experiences as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, it tells the doomed love story of the wounded American Frederic Henry and the British nurse who cares for him and weaves that story into the larger tragedy of brutal war in the foothills of the Alps. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice,” declares Henry: “the sacrifices were like the stockyards of Chicago.” In the end “only the names of places had dignity . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.” The film version brought this home above all through its graphic depiction of the carnage and chaos of the battle of Caporetto.⁹⁷

Today most of these books and films from ten years on are often interpreted as unequivocally antiwar, but that is not how their authors presented them at the time. “My work,” insisted Remarque, “is not political, neither pacifist nor militarist in intention, but human simply . . . I merely wanted to awaken understanding for a generation that more than all others has found it difficult to make its way back from the four years of death, struggle and terror.” Robert Graves professed a similar motive, encapsulated in the title of his memoir, to say “goodbye to all that” because “once all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again.” Despite his studied cynicism, Graves remained proud of his wartime service and volunteered again in 1939, only to be declared unfit.⁹⁸

A particularly interesting example of authorial ambivalence is the English dramatist R. C. Sherriff, whose play Journey’s End ran for 593 performances at the Savoy Theatre in 1929–30 and was broadcast over the radio on Armistice Day. Set in a claustrophobic British dugout, the play explores the relentless psychological pressures of war on a group of soldiers and ends with them all being overwhelmed in the great German offensive of March 21, 1918. Today Journey’s End is seen as an antiwar classic and many reviewers took that line at the time. J. B. Priestley called it “the strongest plea for peace I know.” But the word most used by reviewers and audiences was “realism”: the play’s evocation of life at the front grabbed both those who had endured the trenches and those who had wondered from afar. Sherriff, who had served as an officer on the Western Front, insisted: “I have not written this play as a piece of propaganda. And certainly not as propaganda for peace. Neither have I tried to glorify the life of the soldier, nor to point any kind of moral. It is simply the expression of an ideal. I wanted to perpetuate the memory of some of those men.”⁹⁹

There is, of course, nothing definitive about an author’s intention. Most significant works of art can be read in various ways; that openness is, indeed, what helps make them significant. Yet Sherriff’s assertions remind us of the dangers of translating our attitudes back into the 1920s and 1930s. The bulk of British novels and films about the war in those decades did not preach a clear antiwar message. What they did was to highlight sharply the horrors of war while leaving open its ultimate meaning: readers and audiences judged that meaning according to their own prior convictions. For Arthur Ponsonby the war had been wrong in 1914 and it was still wrong in 1928: he deployed the latest evidence accordingly. For Henry Newbolt the war was unequivocally right in August 1914 and he had not changed his opinion on the tenth anniversary. The “best” of Wilfred Owen’s poems he considered “terribly good, but of course limited, almost all on one note . . . Owen and the rest of the broken men rail at the Old Men who sent the young to die: they have suffered cruelly, but in the nerves and not the heart.” Newbolt concluded sternly: “I don’t think these shell-shocked war poems will move our grandchildren greatly.”¹⁰⁰ At the time, this seemed a reasonable bet. Although a full edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems appeared in 1931, his poetry did not attract real attention until the 1960s.

However tempting it is to generalize, the “meaning” of the Great War was judged in many different ways by some forty million British people, of differing ages and political persuasions. Even those who lived through 1914–18 had been “fighting different wars”—men and women, adults and children, soldiers and civilians, Tommies in the trenches and behind the lines.¹⁰¹ As time elapsed, with around three-quarters of a million births each year, a significant segment of the British population had no experience or memory of the war at all. That is why it is problematic to write off Britain in the 1920s and 1930s as a “morbid age,” obsessed with 1914–18, or to claim that “the Myth of the War” had been fixed in the British consciousness by 1930, as a story of young men sent by the elders to senseless slaughter.¹⁰² War was hell—that was axiomatic—but Britain had emerged victorious and few people would go so far as to assert that the Great War had been pointless, if only out of respect for the dead and the bereaved. Ten years after the armistice the concept of “sacrifice” remained compelling.¹⁰³ So 1914–18 might still be justified if it did indeed prove to be the war to end wars. Ultimately the meaning of the War would depend on the persistence of the Peace.

 

* Later moved thirty kilometers into the desert by Saddam Hussein at massive cost.

* Brooke was borrowing a conceit already found in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1849), where the roots of the “Old Yew” are “wrapt about the bones” in the churchyard and again in Hardy’s poem “Drummer Hodge” (1899), about a young soldier from “Wessex” killed on the South African veldt, for whom “portion of that unknown plain / Will Hodge forever be.”