In the years after the war, much was done to memorialize the loss while at the same time trivializing the experience of soldiers and offering a sterilized version of events to the public. In World War I: A Very Peculiar History (pages 166-167, these are the bulleted points: during the war, press correspondents were not allowed on the fields of battle; most reports were pure propaganda, that left out the horrors of this war; official war photographers were not supposed to photograph the mountains of dead or the ugly way soldiers had died; soldiers were not allowed to own or use cameras at the front; The Battle of the Somme was a film we have talked about in this class that offered more propaganda than reality, film sets instead of battle fields, and yet still offered a glimpse of trench warfare. The need to make this war less brutal, with smoother edges, indirectly lead to the Second World War, a war that came to a close with General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordering the photography of the atrocities committed so that it would not be easily forgotten, denied, or made to be less than the reality.
The aftermath of the Great War was a quick "return to normal and pretend it never happened" across the world. The generation that were a part of this war and the Spanish influenza epidemic became known as The Lost Generation, those left struggling to find meaning in their experiences while the world demanded them to forget it. Humphrey Bogart, Bela Lugosi (Dracula from early film), Walt Disney, A.A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh), Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, President Harry S. Truman, General Douglas MacArthur, General George S. Patton... all part of The Lost Generation and many whose roles in the Second World War were defined by the First World War.
One of The Lost Generation was Sergeant Alvin York of Tennessee. In his memoirs, Sergent York and the Great War, the final chapter has his thoughts of the end of the war and what it meant for him: Before the war I had never been out of the mountains. I had never wanted to be. I had sorter figured that them-there mountains were our shield against the iniquities of the outside world. They sorter isolated us and kept us together so that we might grow up pureblooded and resourceful and God-loving and God-fearing people. They done that, too, but they done more'n that. They done kept out many of the good and worthwhile things like good roads, schools, libraries, up-to-date homes, and modern farming methods. But I never thought of these things before going to war. Only when I got back home again and got to kinder thinking and dreaming, I sorter realized it... Then I snowed we had to have them. We jes had to. And the more I thought the more I kinder figured that all of my trials and tribulations in the war had been to prepare me for doing just this work in the mountains. All of my suffering in having to go and kill were to teach me to value human lives. All the temptations I done went through were to strengthen my character. All the associations with my buddies were to help me understand and love my brother man. All of the pains I done seed and went through were to help and prepare me. And the fame and fortune they done offered me in the cities were to try me out and see if I was fitted for the work He, wanted me to do... I am blessed with a whole heap of most loyal and powerful friends all over America; and I still have and always will have my faith in God. I know he will not fail to help me. So I'm getting along tol'able well... I ain't going to show any favoritism nohow. I fought with Catholics and Protestants, with Jews, Greeks, Italians, Poles, and Irish, as well as American borned boys in the World War. They were buddies of mine and I larned to love them.
Thiepval Memorial, The Battle of the Somme
WWI: Aftermath and Memory
It's hard to "see" what war does. This clip shows the destruction in the aftermath of the war in comparison to how it looks now. The First World War Remembered
In that last video, there is a poppy on the left side. One of the books for this class has poppies on the cover. In talking with several local people, there was no understanding of what the poppy stands for in regards to the Great War. These days the poppy is sometimes handed out on Memorial Day, the 4th of July, or Veteran's Day (also the date of the Armistice). The red poppy has become the symbol of remembrance for the wars since the First World War, immortalized in the poem In Flanders Fields by Doctor John McCrae.
The Poppy Story tells of the history, the importance of the symbol, and how it is used today.
Bonus material: We Remember Them and World War I Memorial in America
Second Period:
Many videos from this point forward (definitely next semester) will be from the Unites States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives. The first for this class and what we began with this period was The Path to Nazi Genocide, Chapter 1/4: Aftermath of World War I and the Rise of Nazism, 1918-1933.
Joseph Loconte, the author of our book A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War, summarizes the experiences of Tolkien and Lewis post war: their friendship, their faith, and their works. It was well known that Tolkien maintained his faith, while Lewis went into the war as an atheist and came out with the same ideas, bolstered by the futility of this war. The Lost Generation was lost, trying to figure out why things went the way they did. Tolkien himself uses Frodo at the end of The Fellowship of the Rings to question what to do now, where to go, and how to pick things back up having experienced all the things that have changed him permanently forever. There really is no going back, but going forward seems just as hard.
In the book, page 150, Loconte says "Nevertheless, these authors anchor their stories in the ancient idea of the Fall of Man: just as a force of evil entered our world in a distant past, so it inhabits and threatens the worlds of their imaginations. It is the deepest source of alienation and conflict in their stories. Even so, it cannot erase the longing for goodness and joy, so palpably alive in the best and noblest of their characters. They are haunted by the memory of Eden: take away this fundamental idea, and their moral vision collapses... We might expect their stories, rooted in this belief, to lurch one of two directions: either toward triumphalism of the crusader, as we saw during the First World War; or toward fatalism, a cast of mind that renders men and women helpless victims in the storms of life. Instead, the heroes of Middle Earth and Narnia are much more complex. They are often hobbled by their own fears and shortcomings; they resist burdens of war. Yet we also see in them an affirmation of moral responsibility-- an irreducible dignity-- even amid the terrible forces arrayed against them... Yet they carry on... Tolkien's account of the condition of their hearts is as true to human life in the shadow of death as anything in modern prose. Each of them is faced with the appalling clarity of the choice laid before him: to continue in the quest, into dangers and horrors unspeakable, or to take the safe and easy way and turn back."
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on the Power of Fiction details Lewis' move from atheism to Christianity, and the importance of their literary pursuits in using fiction to explain and gain understanding of their common experiences in life.
Bonus material: These C.S. Lewis doodles are the best things ever. Here is one on the topic of Right & Wrong.
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