Blackwell Reference Online

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The Great War … reversed the Idea of Progress.Fussell (1975: 8)One's revulsion to the ghastly horrors of war was submerged in the belief that this was the war to end all wars and Utopia would arise.Corporal J. H. Tansley, quoted in Fussell (1975: 32)World War I, the ‘Great War’ of 1914–18, cost a staggering ten million lives, overwhelmingly men aged between 16 and 30, brought emotional and social torment to millions bereaved and injured, and left political and social scars that have not healed. Historian John Keegan has no doubt that it ‘inaugurated the manufacture of mass death’, and with many European historians also knows it to have ‘damaged the rational and liberal civilization of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilization also’ (Keegan 1999: 4, 8). Despite the rhetoric of the time it proved not only not ‘the war to end all wars’ but rather a forceps for the bloodiest century in human history: World War II, from 1939 to 1945, ‘five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms’, was also ‘the direct outcome of World War I, and in large measure its continuation’ (Keegan 1999: 3, 9). Armistice Day 1918, marked by ceremonies throughout Britain (and continental Europe) on 11 November, remains the primary commemoration of all war- and service-dead, and published or broadcast military ... log in or subscribe to read full text