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alties, the notion of a lost generation was exaggerated. But
the social and cultural effects were profound and enduring.
For example, more than half a million of those who died
were aged under 30, and about 90 per cent of the fatalities
came from the working class.
the necessary war, 1914--1918 25
Thus there began, soon after the Armistice, two decades
of national mourning behind a facade of hectic gaiety whose
monumental, social and religious aspects are now interest-
ing scholars.46 Scarcely had the guns stopped firing than
tourists began to visit the gruesome makeshift cemeter-
ies, gradually to be transformed into beautiful and deeply
moving religious sites resembling English gardens. On 11
November 1920 the Unknown Warrior was carried from
France and buried in Westminster Abbey. British ship-
ments of headstones to France numbered about four thou-
sand a week for several years.47 Huge memorials were raised
at Thiepval, Ypres (the Menin Gate) and elsewhere, con-
taining the names of tens of thousands of soldiers with no
known grave (some 73,400 names at Thiepval alone). At
home memorials were commissioned for churches and pub-
lic places in cities, towns and villages throughout the land.
Only a handful of villages in the whole kingdom claimed
the enviable distinction of having no fatalities.48
These memorials and monuments remind us that British
fatalities in the armed forces between 1914 and 1918 were
greater than those in the Second World War by a ratio of
three or four to one. In these circumstances there was an
understandable tendency to repress memories of the recent
war. The possibility of fighting another great war against
Germany within a generation could not be contemplated.
For most people war had been stripped of its last vestiges
of romance. If it had formerly been accepted as an instru-
ment of policy it was so no longer. With every passing year
the costs of the recent war loomed larger while its benefits
became harder to appreciate. It was natural to blame all the
disappointments of the post-war world on to the war it-
self, whereas benefits such as the restoration and extension
of a democratic system, greater freedom and opportuni-
ties for women, the avoidance of revolution, and the gen-
erally sound discipline of the armed forces were taken for
26 the unquiet western front
granted. Even more imponderable were the alternative de-
velopments (now termed counter-factuals ) which might
have occurred had Britain not taken part in the war at all.
In fact the real , historical war abruptly ceased to exist
in November 1918. Thereafter it was swallowed by imag-
ination in the guise of memory. 49 Only a few historians
sought to preserve, order and interpret the events of the
war objectively, and in the short term theirs was not the
approach which the public needed.
The resurrection and reworking of the First World War
largely in terms of individual experience in the form of
novels, memoirs and war literature in general will form
the subject of my second chapter.
2 Goodbye to all that, 1919--1933
Thirty years ago Correlli Barnett published a fierce cri-
tique of British anti-war literature in the 1920s from a
historian s viewpoint. Although his overall thesis, namely
that the anti-war literature seriously undermined the pub-
lic s readiness to resist Nazism in the 1930s, differs from
mine, nevertheless his indictment still provides a firm basis
for my own account.1
Barnett pointed out that most of the best-known memoirs
and novels were written by ex-public school temporary of-
ficers who were much more sensitive and imaginative than
the vast majority of their comrades. They reacted exces-
sively to the privations and miseries inseparable from all
wars which the hardier, tougher other ranks endured phleg-
matically; indeed he suggested that in some respects they,
the ordinary soldiers, were better off than in civvy street .
Like earlier critics such as Cyril Falls, Barnett accused the
anti-war writers of focusing obsessively on the horrors
of combat thereby distorting the complex reality of mil-
itary experience and, incidentally, masking the fact that
they were killers as well as victims. Most important of all,
27
28 the unquiet western front
because these writers were concerned with conveying per-
sonal experiences as vividly as possible, and anyway had a
limited perspective, they largely evaded the crucial issues of
what the war was about both on the political and strate-
gic levels. This huge omission was understandable, since
they were still close to disturbing events, and did not claim
to be historians, but later commentators too often ignored
these limitations.
In this chapter I intend to discuss definitions of what
it meant to be an anti-war writer circa 1929 and to sug-
gest that the influence of this literature was more restricted
than is generally assumed. I also wish to advance the para-
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