Lovely War(114)

For a moving account of one young war nurse who became an activist for peace and women’s rights, I recommend Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain. This beloved memoir stands as one of the greatest women’s accounts of the First World War. A 2014 BBC/Heyday Films feature film adaptation starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington beautifully depicts the book’s essence.

American women volunteered in large numbers as well, including African American women. Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, by Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson, is a firsthand account that provides a frank look at the persecution faced, and the inspiring work done, by women who served as YMCA volunteers at the Camp Lusitania “Negro hut” at Saint-Nazaire.





IMPACT OF WORLD WAR I


World War I was the first war to use aircraft for surveillance and combat in any significant way, and the first war in which submarines were used to great effect. Tanks were invented during the Great War—a project directed by Winston Churchill—in hopes of bursting through the craters and barbed wire of no-man’s-land to penetrate enemy lines. By land, by sea, and by air, an entirely new form of war was waged, using heavy artillery field guns capable of bombing targets scores of miles away. Although nuclear weapons and smart missiles were yet to appear, World War I gave us modern warfare as we now know it.

Medical advances emerged from the treatment of the war’s millions of casualties. Modern weaponry created ghastly, debilitating injuries, but innovations in prosthetics and reconstructive surgery brought many an increased quality of life. Prosthetic facial masks, if eerie-looking, concealed gruesome facial injuries and lent their wearers dignity and privacy.

Injuries less likely to be seen, but no less debilitating for many, were mental and emotional. It wasn’t until later in the war that the concussive impact upon the brain of nearby explosions was better understood. It took longer still for the psychological devastation of trench warfare to be seen as a war injury and not mere cowardice or weakness. Manifestations of “shell shock” varied from uncontrollable shaking, to refusal to return to combat, to erratic behavior, suicide, nightmares, screaming, depression, anxiety, and violent behavior. Hospitals like the one in Maudsley grew in number and expanded their mental health facilities, designing them with comfort, therapy, rehabilitation, and medication management in mind. Pink walls and friendly, cheerful treatment were innovations. Though the world had, and still has, a long way to go in understanding, treating, and destigmatizing mental illness, it’s inspiring to see what gains were made in the name of compassion and sympathy for those who suffered in ways that, not long prior, would have been scorned as cowardly or “unmanly.”





A WAR OF THE OLD UPON THE YOUNG


Older men made the decisions that thrust the world into war in the summer of 1914, but it was chiefly the young who bore the war’s burden. Countless youth lied about their age and enlisted as young teens.

Throughout the war, soldiers who saw lives wasted in endless, futile carnage for no perceptible gain grew increasingly disillusioned with the middle-aged leaders who poured out young blood like water from the safety of their leather-backed chairs. The disparity between the gore and filth of the trenches and the image of heroic honor conjured by war propaganda caused a crisis of faith—both religious and patriotic—for millions.

Poets and artists in the trenches used art to lambaste this war apparently waged by the old upon the young. The works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Alan Seeger, and Edward Thomas, and even the idealistic early war poetry of Rupert Brooke, stand as memorials to youth and innocence lost forever, alongside works by well-known writers and poets such as Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Women working at the Front, among them Vera Brittain, the author of Testament of Youth, contributed stunning poetry to the war canon. The Poetry Foundation has compiled an outstanding collection of World War I poetry on its website. It’s brilliant, bitter, and heartbreaking.

For memoirs and fictional accounts of life at the Front from soldiers who fought there, I recommend the perennial classics All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, and Good-bye to All That, by Robert Graves.

The causes and provocations that led the world into such a devastating war aren’t easily distilled; perhaps for that reason, the First World War remains less understood than the Second. For eminently readable accounts of how we got into such a global mess, I recommend the highly acclaimed works The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, and The War That Ended Peace, by Margaret MacMillan.





IN MEMORIAM


Researching and writing Lovely War made me love these soldiers, these Tommys and Poilus and Doughboys and Anzacs and Jerrys who fought and died along the Western Front because they had no choice. But it wasn’t until I traveled to France and Belgium, visiting preserved trenches and underground tunnels, still-hollowed shell craters, breathtaking monuments, war museums, and row after row of pristine gravestones—witnessing Europe’s fidelity to their memory—that I began to glimpse the true cost of this war. I have never seen anything like it. Lovingly tended graves marked “Welsh Soldier, Known Only to God,” broke my heart.

A frequent theme in the writings of men at the Front was their marveling at how, over the shell-blasted wasteland of the killing fields, a glorious sunset could still paint the sky, or the freshness of dew and birdsong could still make morning sweet. Even in the trenches. For all its horror and despair, for many, the Great War sharpened life, showing it for the brief and fleeting gift it was, and revealing home, freedom, safety, family, beauty, and love to be precious beyond price.