by Philipp Blom
The war both revealed profound divisions and opened new ones—between veterans and noncombatants, those on the right and those on the left, the young and the old, those seeking to create a new world and those wishing to restore their idea of an old order. All societies became not only more impoverished but also less cohesive, less hopeful, and more unsettled. Their economies had been shattered (with the exception of the United States), and the societies themselves and their values had been shaken to their very foundations. Toward the end of the war, starting in August 1918, at the very height of the deprivations and the misery, an influenza epidemic swept through the world. This “Spanish flu” killed an estimated 3 percent of the world’s population overall, but the death rate was much higher in the dense and deprived cities of Europe and in the United States. Four hundred thousand died in France alone. The end of the war saw the European countries plunged into a series of potentially devastating emergencies. There was a demographic disaster, a political disaster, and an economic disaster; they all converged in a cultural catastrophe.
A Sense of Shock
IF THERE WAS A NEW WORLD in the making, it came out of the lack of understanding of what had taken place and why, out of a sense of shock. What had been familiar before the war appeared to have become strange, what had been understood suddenly incomprehensible. Writing about shell shock victims, the highly respected medical journal The Lancet had commented: “Some men blind, some men dumb, and some crazy, and these all of them MEN, with a newly-earned meaning in the word; for there is a new meaning now in many an old word. We shall want a brand-new Dictionary.”14 But there was no such dictionary, no new and magic method for unlocking the mysteries of a world estranged.
A whole continent shared the mute, uncomprehending horror and the wide-eyed stare of the shell-shocked combatants whose experience had been too much for a human frame to bear. As millions of traumatized soldiers were demobilized and returned home, they found that there was no way of communicating what they had lived through, of understanding what had happened, and why. All they knew was that they had been betrayed and put in harm’s way under false pretenses, that the thrusting, vertiginously energetic, but also fundamentally optimistic world they had inhabited only four years earlier was irrevocably lost.
The pervasive sense of dislocation and betrayal described by victors and vanquished alike was partly due to sheer numbers: Germany alone had to contend with 6 million demobilized soldiers demanding work, in addition to 2.7 million veterans who were permanently crippled. These men returned home with injuries not only to their bodies but to their minds. Most of them never spoke about the war; their children were forbidden to ask.
In France, this sense of loss and betrayal was overwhelming. The country had suffered like no other in western Europe: more than 10 percent of the population were direct casualties of the war, while civilians had also suffered greatly from food shortages, insufficient medical supplies, and the effects of the influenza epidemic. Industrial production had collapsed, as there were too few workers everywhere; in the northwestern part of the country, which had borne the brunt of the fighting, thousands of villages had been reduced to rubble, tens of thousands of businesses had vanished, and the infrastructure lay in ruins. France was deeply in debt and the value of the franc fell by half in the first year after the war.
The difficult economic environment in France was the setting for a generational conflict of particular severity. As elsewhere, particularly in Germany and the United States, for returning French servicemen it was difficult to find their way into civilian life, but even for those who had stayed behind the transition to peacetime was fraught with disappointments and disillusion. A generation of young men had been fed on a diet of patriotic rhetoric, exhorted to die a glorious death and find glory in suffering on the battlefield. Brought up to fight the boche, they found suddenly that the war had ended and their patriotic fervor was no longer desired; now they were supposed to be sober, settled citizens working for the reconstruction of a country that had been severely weakened by its victory and was less self-confident and less influential in the world. The vacuum left by the peace meant that many young Frenchmen lacked an orientation. “Growing up in a lost Europe of blood and hate, amidst demented or terrified men, what direction, what support could our youth find?” one of them, Marcel Arland, would write.15
Many young people discovered that it was difficult to acclimate to the new and unheroic life of peacetime. Before the war, as an adolescent, the French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle had dreamed of being strong and athletic, but he had had to accept that he was not cut out to be a sporting hero. Then, on the battlefield, he found himself leading a bayonet charge, having discovered hidden reserves of courage in his reedy, overly refined physique. He relished being a soldier and loved every moment of his experience: modern life, with all its decadent complexities and meaningless pleasures, reduced to killing or being killed. He celebrated war and was dismayed when peace broke out and with it returned the banality of bourgeois life.
Young men such as journalist and writer Jean Prévost were also bitterly disappointed by this shabby peace. “They taught us that only one thing was respectable: to fight,” he wrote. “We accepted the fact that we were inferior to the combatants and that we would spend the rest of our lives admiring them. We despised civilians and had no respect for old men, teachers, women, or ourselves. . . . When the war ended, we assumed that everything would change. We would be happy; we would become a serious people like the Americans.”16 But when peace came, nothing changed. The returning soldiers were not shining heroes to look up to; they were troubled and traumatized, many of them were crippled, and they had little time for the illusions of teenagers eager to look up to someone.
A deep sense of suspicion settled between the veterans and the society they had defended. “What all self-analysts of the post-war generation could agree on was the uniqueness of their experience, their scepticism about pre-war values, their openness to new departures, and their alienation from returning veterans,” writes Robert Wohl in his account of this “generation of 1914.” “Their ambivalence toward returning veterans . . . was also the result of disenchantment. Brought up during the war to admire the men in horizon blue and to worship them as heroes, they found those who returned to be immature, insufficiently serious, and hopelessly old-fashioned in their values. Moreover, they were . . . put off by their apparent preoccupation with death; disappointed by their powerlessness to effect wide-ranging changes in society; and bored by their obsession with the war.”17
The eighteen-year-old Jean Prévost described his disgust at the returning soldiers who were crippled or disfigured. These were not the heroes he had imagined encountering. In Germany and Austria, people’s reactions were often very similar when confronted with those whose physical or psychological injuries were too obvious to be ignored.
These desperate figures were what had been celebrated by so many orators and writers: the conquering heroes of patriotic propaganda, the virile bodies steeled for future greatness in the furnace of war. The war was not what it was supposed to have been. Not only had it annihilated the graceful villages, forests, and meadows of Belgium and northeastern France, scarred the majestic Alpine rockscapes fought over so bitterly between Austrian and Italian units, and bloodied the lands along the Eastern Front, from Riga on the Baltic Sea down to Galicia and Czernowitz in today’s Ukraine, but it had turned men into wrecks, heroes into ghostly accusers. They had been hailed as heroes, but now they were often seen as troublemakers, beggars, carriers of infections both medical and moral, dangerous subversives, ugly reminders of shame and catastrophe.
While most people preferred to look away, the depiction of the ugly face of war and its aftermath was taken up with particular fervor by expressionist artists, whose stark depictions of horror began where documentary photography stopped. Georges Grosz and Otto Dix in particular created canvases filled with the grotesque suffering of the ordinary soldiers, as the officers, monsters in uniform wi
th shaven heads and dead-looking piglike eyes, indulge their obscene, bone-headed obsession with death and honor.
For Remembrance
ON JULY 19, 1919, as Britain marked the official end of hostilities with a victory parade, a cenotaph (literally “empty tomb”) of wood and plaster had been erected in Whitehall as a monument to the millions of soldiers whose remains had been unrecognizable and whose mangled and fragmentary bodies lay in anonymous war graves. This Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was eventually replaced with a permanent structure of stone. The Unknown Soldier, a hero without a face, became the face of official remembrance of a catastrophe beyond description and comprehension.
In 1920, in addition to the symbolic cenotaph (which was indeed empty), the remains of an anonymous British combatant were buried at Westminster Abbey. Other countries also quickly erected Tombs of the Unknown Soldier: in Paris under the Arc de Triomphe, in Rome’s grandiose Monumento a Vittorio Emmanuele II, and in the central place of American military memory, Arlington Cemetery.
In Germany, the city fathers of Weimar were prepared to take the nation’s grief right to the country’s spiritual heart, the dwelling place of Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche. A 1924 architectural plan envisioned an Ehrenhain, a grove of honor that was to house thousands of soldiers’ graves, constructed on a hillside and sloping gently down behind Goethe’s mythical summer home. A lack of funds prevented the project from being realized.
The ghosts of the soldiers who never returned home received central places of commemoration, foci for communal grief. But they continued to haunt the living, and many aspects of the interwar years are understandable only from the perspective of the trauma, betrayal, and disillusionment suffered during and immediately after the war. Rituals of remembrance could focus the public sense of loss, but even they and the monuments themselves were hotly disputed between political opponents. The social fracturing and fraying that had been briefly subdued during the war now reemerged with even greater force, and the shattered certainties created a powerful longing for great truths and authoritative answers. No feeling is more profoundly disturbing and corroding than that of living a senseless life.
As Europeans struggled to fathom the extent of their loss, new certainties were constructed. One of these was the nostalgic vision of an intact, almost paradisiac world before 1914, which was communicated by films, operettas, novels, and newspapers. So great was the need for some kind of truth and for a strong causality to replace the apparent chaos of the summer of 1914 that the very people who had lived through the years 1900–1914 and had described them as dizzying, frightening, hurtling too fast in an unknown direction, and profoundly disorienting were now only too willing to accept the image of a stable Indian summer of the nineteenth century, when people had lived moral lives, known their station, and devoted themselves to elaborate social rituals and the furthering of the arts.
At the beginning of the 1930s, the image of the golden world of yesterday was already firmly established and celebrated in film, fiction, and memoirs. Living somewhere in London and by now father of a family, Campbell Willie Martin may have been one of the millions indulging their nostalgia for a better world. But perhaps he knew better, faithful to the memory of the trauma that came back to him at night, in the dreams so feared by those who had seen what no human eye should ever see and lived through it all.
·1919·
A Poet’s Coup
We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.
Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. . . . And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.
—Paul Valéry, Crisis of the Mind (1919)
NEVER HAD A CITY BEEN MORE TRIUMPHANTLY TAKEN THAN WHEN the trucks filled with volunteers poured into Fiume on September 12, 1919, to be acclaimed by thirty thousand enthusiastic people, practically the entire population of the city. At the head of the dashing occupying force rode a living legend, a war hero and the greatest living Italian poet: Gabriele d’Annunzio, who had risked everything to free the town from its occupiers and return it to the Italian motherland. From the balcony of the town hall, draped with the flags of the newly liberated town, the new master spoke to the population: “Italians of Fiume . . . here I am. . . . Today I wish to say nothing more. . . . Here is the man who has abandoned everything to be wholly at the service of your cause. . . . Here I am . . . I the volunteer, I who have fought in all arms, I the wounded and the mutilated, I reply to the deep anxiety of my country by declaring the city of Fiume today restored for ever to mother Italy.”1
There was only one problem: mother Italy did not want the little town with its mostly Italian population on the Croatian coast. It had ceded the territory during the negotiations for the peace treaty of Saint-Germain and had received extensive lands in return. D’Annunzio’s poetic escapade was unwelcome, and the prime minister pretended not to notice even after the author-turned-autocrat wrote him an effusive letter laying power at his feet.
Unperturbed by this setback, D’Annunzio created a free state on the eleven square miles of territory that were now his. He was the master of the grand gesture, after all. During the war, he had enlisted in the Italian army even though his advanced age—he was fifty-two when war broke out—would have excused him. He had flown planes, engaged in combat, led from the front. In 1918 he had even achieved a daring propaganda coup by flying to Vienna, the capital of Italy’s old European adversary, and dropping hundreds of pamphlets emblazoned with the Italian tricolor and the proud claim that he could have dropped bombs instead. He was no longer flying the plane himself, however; an accident on a mission two years earlier had cost him his right eye. He was a war hero who had sacrificed for his country.
Perhaps the sacrifice was not so much for the glory of Italy as for the glory of D’Annunzio, one of the most mercurial and fascinating writers in a time full of great characters. Small, balding, and far from handsome, he was proud of having seduced, as he claimed, hundreds of women, among them some of the richest, most aristocratic, and most famous of their time. A notorious voluptuary, he had spent the past few years in Paris in order to avoid the legions of his Italian creditors, who had financed his extravagant lifestyle, which included several splendid villas and a wardrobe boasting hundreds of pairs of shoes and countless gloves in exotic leathers and delicate hues. He was famous for possessing a nightshirt with a gold-embroidered round hole in the front to facilitate congress with his current lover; for being a worthy heir of the great Casanova as well as a master of heady verse infused with passion, perfume, and allusions from antiquity; for styling himself as a modern Icarus, flying ever higher toward the sun. During his time as a fighter pilot he was seen boarding the plane in high-heeled patent leather boots polished every morning by his faithful manservant.
Even his greatest detractors had to admit that his poetry was extraordinary: sumptuous, powerful, and prescient as well as totally amoral. He had always known how to convey in words the most refined, most avant-garde sentiments of the period. During the fin de siècle he had been the prince of decadent poets; at the beginning of the vertiginous twentieth century he had discovered flying and rhapsodized about velocity, fast machines, and seduction; when war broke out he had become a soldier extolling the virtues of virile struggle; and now, in Fiume, he cast himself in a new mold.
D’Annunzio had taken the city out of a feeling of outrage, using his fame to find allies among the soldiers who felt betrayed and disappointed at the terms of the peace, which had granted land they regarded as Italian to other countries. Now he was determined to use this power to create out of the energy of the moment a new kind of movement, of community. Already during the war, as he had attempted to push his government to enter into the conflict by giving speeches whose passion added to his already enormous fame, D’Annunzio had discovered a new, darkl
y fascinating power in his oratory and in the experience of rousing the passion of thousands:
Faces, faces, faces; every passion from every face runs through my wounded eye, innumerable as grains of warm sand through the fist. Is it not the Roman crowd of May, the evening of the Capito? Enormous, swaying, howling. I feel my pallor burning like a white flame. There is nothing of myself left in me. I am like the demon of tumult, I am like the genius of the free people. . . . I see at last my Credo in blood and spirit. I am no longer intoxicated with myself alone, but with all my race. . . . They sway and are swayed. I ascend to crown them and I ascend to crown myself. . . . The mob howls and writhes to beget its destiny. . . . The mob is like an incandescent metal. All the mouths of the mould are open. A gigantic statue is being cast.2
The poet-turned-politician set about fashioning the statue of what he called, against the will of his co-conspirators, not the republic but the impresa—the adventure, the undertaking, the coup—of Fiume. His inspirational and grandiloquent speeches from the balcony became daily events, eagerly listened to by his troops, who were soon bored with life in the small harbor town; he raised his arm in a Roman salute, which he had seen and admired in a performance at the Paris opera; he appeared in uniform and adopted the title duce.
All this posturing had a strongly operatic air, as two British travelers, the brothers Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, recounted. Like thousands of other adventurous young people, they had been drawn to the little state and wanted to meet its commander in the town hall “built in the well-known Renaissance-elephantoid style that is the dream of every Municipal Council the world over.” Being well spoken and well connected, they were admitted, though not before witnessing with a sort of baffled fascination the scenes playing themselves out on the streets: “The general animation and noisy vitality seemed to herald a new land, a new system. . . . Every man here seemed to wear a uniform designed by himself: some had beards, and had shaved their heads completely, so as to resemble the Commander himself, who was now bald; others had cultivated huge tufts of hair, half a foot long, waving out from their foreheads, and wore, balanced on the very back of their scull, a black fez.”3 Some of the freedom fighters were white-haired veterans of the campaigns of Giuseppe Garibaldi, half a century before.
