by Philipp Blom
Dealing with the charged and changing time between 1900 and 1914, The Vertigo Years was based on a thought experiment: namely, to imagine that we could look at this period without the shadow of the impending First World War, without a narrow teleology. The portrait that emerged was of a time full of contradictions, optimism, friction, and vertiginous speed, looking into an open future. For the interwar period this experiment would not yield any similarly interesting results, because there was always the threat of another war, or rather of the same large conflict erupting again.
The war in 1939 did not come as a great surprise to many people. It had been predicted ever since the Treaty of Versailles had locked Germany into a state of permanent crisis. In Paris in 1919, the young Spanish portraitist José Simont was commissioned to draw the president of the Chambre des Députés, Paul Deschanel, who had been involved in the negotiation of the treaty that had officially ended the war. Deschanel would be elected president of France the following year, but for the time being he chatted with the artist who was engaged in drawing him. When Simont asked him what he thought of the Treaty of Versailles, Deschanel’s analysis was succinct: “Nous venons de signer la deuxième guerre mondiale—we have just signed on to the Second World War.”
Deschanel’s pessimistic analysis of Versailles was echoed by the influential British economist John Maynard Keynes as well as others. The demands of the victorious Allies had cast Europe off balance. In particular, French president Georges Clemenceau had insisted on imposing high reparations on an already ruined Germany; while this may have appeared morally just, a country that was the central power and economic engine of the continent should not have been allowed to become unstable and teeter on the brink of revolution. The inbuilt fragility of Germany’s young republic bore terrible dangers for the future.
In his great novel The Man Without Qualities, written mostly during the early 1920s, Robert Musil describes Vienna before the war. The ostensible plot for this comedy of morals is an attempt by a group of Habsburg officials and intellectuals to sum up the age and find a fitting tribute for the seventy-year anniversary of the emperor’s reign, coming up in 1918. This grand effort, called the “Parallel Campaign,” is an utter failure, however, because nobody is sure what, if anything, unifies the age, or which of the many ideologies, worldviews, and scientific achievements deserves precedence over all others. After a thousand pages and scores of grand projects and profound plans, all that remains is a modest procession in favor of world peace, with participants in traditional dress.
Musil’s novel is set during the year before the war, but the confusion at its heart also describes the atmosphere of hostility during the postwar years. Amid the continuing seismic realignment of social and intellectual positions, there was no firm ground to be had, no grand unifying cause behind which everyone could rally. The surge of the new, the experience of modernity, was too replete with confusing possibilities to allow any one of them to impose itself. Consequently, the protagonist of the novel, a man called Ulrich, cannot decide what to do with his life.
As the Parallel Campaign gradually breaks apart and becomes a parody of its original ambitions, the cautious rationalist Ulrich becomes aware that all great promises are almost always false. Writing about the year 1914, Musil was commenting on the world a decade later, a world that had suffered a collective experience that appeared to have changed everything but was still pulsating with the currents and energies released during the first decade of the twentieth century—energies that continue to shape our lives today.
PART I
POSTWAR
A generation that still drove to school in horse-drawn carriages suddenly stood under the open sky in a landscape in which nothing but the clouds had remained unchanged, and in the center, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.
—Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 1936
·1918·
Shell Shock
Rumour had it that the constant twitching and jerking and snorting was caused by something called shell-shock, but we were not quite sure what that was. We took this to mean that an explosive object had gone off very close to him with such an enormous bang that it had made him jump high in the air and he hadn’t stopped jumping since.
—Roald Dahl, Boy, 1984
CAMPBELL WILLIE MARTIN WAS ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES. HE WAS alive. He had escaped from hell after little more than a year and, despite having been wounded twice, had lost no limb. He had been a good soldier. Born in London in 1895 to a policeman and his wife, in October 1914, at age twenty-nine, he had enlisted as a volunteer private in the Royal Fusiliers, and had made lance corporal in early 1916. By then he was already serving on the Western Front, in the midst of slaughter on an industrial scale.
Then, on July 16 of that year, having been pinned down in a trench for hours during severe shelling, Martin lost consciousness. The next day, when his trench was hit by a shell, he saw eight of his comrades die in the explosion, and he lay buried under debris for an entire night before he was rescued. As a result of this, according to his personnel file, the “following day [he] felt very queer muscular tremor set in[,] a fit of crying[,] follow[ed] by loss of consciousness for some hours.”
Nameless horror: The German artist Otto Dix transformed his wartime experiences into powerful evocations of life and death in the trenches.
Lance Corporal Martin was found to be suffering from “shell shock,” as the doctors had come to name this trauma from exposure to artillery fire and the sight of violent death, and he was graded at 25 percent disability—enough to be sent back to England for treatment at a specialized hospital. Again he was lucky: initially, the men exhibiting such symptoms had been treated as malingerers. Some had been simply sent back to the trenches, while others had been on the receiving end of an old-fashioned kind of treatment that the older officers in particular had hoped would stem the tide of the new phenomenon:
They were apt to be rather stern. I remember one man came in, big chap, six footer, and he was shaking with a shell-shock and I was amazed, the colonel lifted his heavy stick and hit him across the head on his—he had his tin hat on—hit him across the head to give him another shock and he used the words “you’re a bloody fool, pull yourself together.” But that couldn’t put the man right and he could see he really had gone beyond, so of course he was taken care of and he went down. But they tried sometimes to give them a type of reverse shock, you see, to try and reverse the process but it rarely worked.1
Some soldiers who had not responded to this old-fashioned method and who had run away, refused to “go over the top,” or simply broken down and hidden in the muddy trenches had been court-martialed for cowardice. More than three hundred “deserters,” from Britain and elsewhere in that country’s empire, were executed in a miserable dawn ritual, many of them unable to stand upright, shaking and quivering even as they were bound to a wooden post to be shot by their own comrades.2
But by late 1916, with the war intensifying and the terrible weapons of the new century—machine guns, poison gas, and huge artillery capable of firing over distances of twenty miles in bombardments that could last for days—the British military and medical establishments had been forced to reconsider. That year’s appalling four-month Battle of the Somme had resulted in more than a million casualties, and of those who emerged alive from the waterlogged trenches, many had suffered major psychological damage. Among the British forces alone, thirty thousand men were showing symptoms of the strange new condition that rendered them useless as soldiers and an ongoing burden to their units. Reluctantly the authorities began to accept that a man might be severely impaired even when he seemed to be physically unharmed, and soon these mental casualties were arriving at military hospitals by the tens of thousands.
Campbell Willie Martin was among them, and he was to remain hospitalized until after the end of the war. He is described as having been excitable and suffering from insomnia, severe headaches, recu
rrent panic, memory loss, and a persistent tremor in his hands. Though the doctors noted his “good physique . . . tongue clean, teeth fair,” as late as 1920 his level of disability was still being graded at 20 percent; it had improved only a little since his first admission.
Unspeakable, Godless, Hopeless
MARTIN’S PATIENT FILE is one of thousands pulled from Britain’s National Archives, where they are still preserved; as shell shock went, his case was not particularly severe. Contemporary film footage reveals soldier after soldier reduced to a quivering wreck by the inhumanity of what he has experienced. Faces are grotesquely distorted, etched with a permanent anguish; limbs shake or jerk violently, uncontrollably; a soldier recoils, panic-stricken, at the sight of another man in uniform. In the imaginations of these lost men, the bombardment has clearly never stopped.
These were the living debris of the Great War. In Britain alone, fully 10 percent of the officers and 7 percent of the ranks were eventually diagnosed with shell shock, with some thirty-seven thousand awarded war pensions on account of it. The military doctors had learned early how to deal with the physically wounded, with legs and arms blown off or stretched out for amputation, eyes blinded by gas and eardrums burst by explosions, and faces ruined by ghastly disfigurements—but with the shell shock cases, there were no evident outward wounds.
Some of the worst cases were treated at Netley Hospital in London, among them Private Meek, confined to a wheelchair, shuddering convulsively, oblivious to the orderlies trying to relax his rigid joints; Private Preston, nineteen years of age, who had returned from the trenches mute and unable to understand any word but “bomb,” at the mention of which he would dive under his hospital bed in a fit of terror; Private Smith, buried alive by shellfire in August 1917, walking stiffly, as if on wooden legs, wiping his face compulsively, as if to wash away the mud and the slime of the decomposing bodies that had surrounded him; Sergeant Peters, his spine distorted, his legs shuddering, making a dangerous farce of his every attempt to walk. Broken men, all of them.
Embarking as heroes and saviors of a nation’s freedom, they had returned as pitiful survivors of an inhuman reality. In a 1917 letter to his wife, Margaret, the English painter Paul Nash, then stationed on the Western Front near Ypres, had described the awful scene:
No pen or drawing can convey this country. . . . Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous, they are mockeries to man, only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds all through the bitter black of night is fit atmosphere for such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered with inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease. . . . It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.3
Soldiers home on leave from this monstrous reality often found themselves more frustrated than relieved. Having lived in an ongoing butchery that had come to seem senseless, having slept alongside unburied corpses and witnessed friends and comrades ripped apart by the random, anonymous destruction of a shell fired from miles away, having lost trust in old faiths and respect for their superiors, and having come to doubt the justice of their national cause, they returned home to a world dominated by patriotic rhetoric and the wisdom of armchair warriors who continued to regard the war as just and as an opportunity for heroism and manly combat—in effect, as a kind of operetta war, a view that took no account of the savage reality and merely added insult to terrible injury. As early as 1915, a journalist for the leftist Labour Leader, a newspaper with pacifist leanings, had described one soldier back from the front: “[He] began laughing, a queer laugh. He went on laughing and I knew it was because the horrors he had been through were so incongruous with his experience of life till then that it seemed a joke.”4
Wilfred Owen’s “shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells” remained with the returning soldiers when they were on leave and even after their final return home. The celebrated war poet, who until 1915 had served as a vicar’s assistant while studying at University College, Reading, became a victim of shell shock himself after his trench position was hit by a mortar. Flung into the air, Second Lieutenant Owen had landed among the dismembered corpses of his comrades killed by the blast. Following this horrific incident, he was trapped for days between the two enemy lines, an experience he relayed to his mother in a letter of January 1917:
I have suffered seventh hell.
I have not been at the front.
I have been in front of it.
I held an advanced post, that is, a dug-out in the middle of No Man’s Land. . . .
My dug-out held 25 men tightly packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.
The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn’t.
Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life.5
Rescued from his advance post, one of very few survivors, he broke down.
Recuperating at Craiglockhart Hospital in Scotland, haunted by the terrors he had endured, Owen began to cast his experience of the hell that was trench warfare in stark lines of verse. He was inspired by his encounter with another patient, the poet and officer Siegfried Sassoon.
Aristocratic, exotic, handsome, and self-possessed, Sassoon was everything that the modestly born Owen had always longed to be. Wealthy and artistic, Anglo-Catholic on his mother’s side and Baghdadi Jewish on his father’s, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, Sassoon was imbued with the indestructible self-confidence of the British upper class. He had volunteered on the day war was declared and had distinguished himself at the front, being awarded the Military Cross for exceptional bravery. But the blue-blooded hero had been sent to Craiglockhart Hospital not because he had been wounded but because he had spoken his mind.
Disgusted with what he had seen during the fighting on the Western Front, in 1917 he had published a protest against the war, using his social contacts to procure a reading for it in Parliament. The previous year, under the wartime Defense of the Realm Act, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, himself an earl and the grandson of a British prime minister, had been dismissed from his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, for publishing a statement of conscientious objection to the war. Russell had hoped to garner public support by being sent to prison, though as it turned out he had only to pay a fine.
For Sassoon, however, a serving officer, the stakes were much higher. Risking a court-martial and even execution, he had written an impassioned attack against those in authority. “I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops,” he declared, “and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. . . . On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”6
There is some evidence of harsher sentencing for men of lower military and social rank, and it does seem that Sassoon’s standing as a war hero and also as a gentleman saved him from a court-martial for treason. Instead of going before the judges—and possibly before a firing squad—he was declared to be suffering from neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion or neurosis) and sent to Craiglockhart Hospital, where he met the younger officer-poet Owen.
Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori
OWEN FELL IMMEDIATELY under Sassoon’s spell. Inspired by his uncompromising courage, Owen himself began to write about his feelings and experiences in a more straightforward way. In what is perhaps his most famous poem, he combines the terror of a poisonous gas attack with the bitter reflections of his comrades-in-arms, convinced now that they have been led into a slaughterhouse by the mendacious ideals of those who taught them. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “sweet and fitting it is to die for the fatherland”—this line from Horace was inscribed on a chapel wal
l at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and the sentiment had informed the education of generations of young officers in training. To Owen and his fellow veterans, it was no more than a cynical lie, and the line was to be quoted countless times as its own indictment. Owen himself was not to enjoy the literary glory he had wrested from the gas and blood of the Western Front. Volunteering to return to France after his discharge from the hospital, he was killed on November 4, 1918, a week before the armistice.
Owen’s death at the age of twenty-five became symbolic of the fate of his whole generation—the “lost generation,” as it was quickly called, though more in romantic legend than historical truth. The old men who were thought to have cheated the young generation of their hard-won victory and the ideals they had been fighting for were the generals, the politicians, the bosses, portrayed in angry articles and novels as the cynical and incompetent survivors of the Victorian age. They had sent schoolboys to their deaths, making this breed of superior young men reared on the playing fields of Eton believe that this would be a “jolly war”and that they were there to “play the game.” “Lions led by donkeys,” as the German general Erich von Ludendorff had called them, Britain’s young men had been sacrificed on the fields of Flanders for no gain but the old men’s own.
After the war, it was widely felt, the deaths of these young men meant that there was virtually no one left to carry on the work of empire, of industry, of art and science. The great bloodletting resulted in “the embarrassing spectacle of men of minor powers wrestling with major responsibilities” during the interwar years. “There is impoverishment on all levels,” wrote Reginald Pound, himself a volunteer of 1914. Half a century later he would wonder whether the “strong and cultivated intelligences” of the lost generation could have “seen to it that their second-rate would not become our first-rate, or have arrested the decline of moral indignation into unheroic tolerance.”7
