You Smug-Faced Crowds

In 1914, there were nationalist passions, greed of empires, and complicated relations between countries. All these problems sparked the flames of the First World War. Some people feared war. But in general, much of Europe felt confident. They believed war would be short and easily won. Of course, that’s what the other side thought too. In London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, crowds cheered for war. The British newspaper, the Daily Mirror, featured the picture below on August 6, 1914. War had just been declared on Germany. The newspaper reported that afterward, crowds gathered in the streets. The British royal family were met with “wild, enthusiastic cheers.” In every European capital, governments and newspapers tried to rally the public around the war. They called on their loyalty to king and queen, to the nation, to their tsar, or emperor. On August 5, The Birmingham Daily Mail advertised on its front page: “Your King & Country need you. In this crisis your Country calls on all her young unmarried men to rally round the Flag and enlist in the ranks of her Army.” If all young men joined, “England and her Empire will emerge stronger and more united than ever.”

Hope united people from some European nations. They celebrated killing people from other European nations. Those feelings soon bumped into the realities of industrial war. Disillusionment set in. It’s that feeling of disappointment when something turns out to be not nearly as good as you thought it was. Soldiers saw the horrors of trench warfare and poison gas every day. They were especially disillusioned. Look again at the hopeful picture and quotes above. Then read these two poems. Each are written by young men who fought on the Western Front in France:

Siegfried Sassoon survived the war. He spoke out against it. Soon he was checked into a war hospital to be treated for “shell shock.” It’s a form of the mental condition now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While in the hospital Sassoon befriended Wilfred Owen, another injured soldier. Owen also had shell shock. Eventually, both men were sent back to the war. Sassoon was accidentally wounded by one of his own men. Owen was killed in France at age 25. It was just one week before the war ended. The world would never get another poem from him.

You Are a Lost Generation

Sassoon and Owen were far from alone in their experiences. Forty million people were killed or wounded during this conflict. All over Europe, young men came home when the armistice (declaration of peace) was finally signed. But the optimism of the early days of the war was gone forever.

Soldiers weren’t the only ones disturbed by World War I. Nearly half of the 40 million wounded or killed were civilians—people that were not soldiers. That’s why they called it “total war.” It was unseen in its size and destructive power. Communities tried to recover after the war. Civilians and soldiers looked around. They saw the destruction of their countries. Places where they once met friends and family killed in the fighting were gone.

One group of authors in particular gave voice to the disillusionment of those who grew up during the First World War. Several were American authors living in Paris. The writer Gertrude Stein is credited with giving them their name: The Lost Generation. In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway quotes Stein. She said, “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation… You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.”

“Lost Generation” has a double meaning. It refers to the generation of writers and artists disillusioned after the war. However, it can also refer to the post-war generation more generally. That generation found the cultural lessons they had learned as children did not make sense anymore. They were “lost” in the modern world. But the term also refers to the large percentage of that generation that had died in the violent war. J.R.R. Tolkien also fought in the war. He wrote The Lord of the Rings. War greatly disturbed the young man. Echoes of horror appear in his writing. Tolkien later reflected that, by the end of the war “all but one of my close friends were dead.” Experiences like his were common. Britain and Russia lost around 2 percent of their total population in the war. Germany, France, and Austria lost about four percent. Some nations lost 9 to 15 percent of their prewar populations. Ottoman Empire, Serbia, and Romania were just a few.

The costs of the war changed the minds of many. Before the war, European culture welcomed Enlightenment ideas. Reason, scientific thinking and progress were celebrated. After the war, writers and artists turned to new forms of expression. They questioned a world that had allowed such a conflict. Oswald Spengler was a German historian. He wrote The Decline of the West. Sigmund Freud was a psychologist, studying the mind. He wrote about the struggle within human minds between ego and id. In other words, he saw a battle between the rational and irrational mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald criticized the wastefulness of the rich in The Great Gatsby. In many ways people were challenging what they learned from earlier generations.

Meanwhile, new styles of art and architecture came. They rejected everything that people had depended on before July 1914. They dismissed the idea of reason and wholesomeness. Instead they used irony and focused on how the world made no sense. These artistic movements were often grouped together under the title of “modernism.” They were a reaction to the horrors of the conflict.

Alien Graves

Disillusionment with the war was not limited to Europe. Hundreds of thousands of colonial troops served in the war. They died for a war between their British, German and Spanish colonizers thousands of miles away. Sarojini Naidu was an Indian independence activist and poet. In 1915 she reflected on the price India had to pay its colonizer:

Lo! I have flung to the East and West Priceless treasures torn from my breast, And yielded the sons of my stricken womb To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom.

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves Silent they sleep by the Persian waves, Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands, They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands, They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France.

—Sarojini Naidu, 1915

New nationalist feelings emerged after World War I. Colonized people had had enough. You’ve read about how imperialists justified their control over people in Africa and Asia. They spoke about the “white man’s burden” to take charge. They argued that, by taking over other lands, they were bringing “civilization” to the rest of the world. They brought new technology to these lands, they said. But during World War I, European “civilization” tore itself to shreds in a high-tech war. Asian and African soldiers died alongside British and German troops. Many colonized people wondered why they were fighting a European war. Soon, people in Asia and Africa would adopt European ideas about nationalism. They begin their long march toward independence. The march would not end until after another world war had taken place. It would be even deadlier.

Rejecting the Past

All over the world and in many parts of life, people challenged old beliefs. Old ideas of the Enlightenment, imperialism, and capitalism had sent the world into a horrific war. And for what? The Great War had been called “the war to end all wars.” But people looked around in 1918. They found that the war hadn’t ended any of their problems. But it had ended many lives.

Artists and writers tried new forms of art. They highlighted the absurdity of life in a modern, industrial world. Meanwhile many politicians looked to rebuild the world. Internationalism became popular in the 1920s. The League of Nations aimed to preserve peace. International agreements, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, came about. It spoke against “war as an instrument of national policy.” But as we all know, these attempts failed to end conflict.

Others also aimed to overturn the global order. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution overthrew the imperialist tsar ruler. It rejected the global capitalist economy. In Italy, many people grew disillusioned with the Versailles Peace Treaty. They had fought with the Allies. However, the peace treaty failed to reward Italy with new land. Japan had also fought with the Allied powers. They too felt betrayed. The Europeans did not treat them as equals. In the defeated Germany, many Germans saw the peace terms as overly harsh. Germans became bitter at the victors. In Italy, Japan, and Germany, tyrants would later take advantage of these feelings of disillusionment to seize power.

The First World War was a history-defining moment. It killed millions. Global power was restructured. But for the people living through it, it was hard to see past what was lost. Lives were lost. A sense of progress was gone. And perhaps worst of all, hope was lost. Disappointed people rejecting parts of modern society. Artists rejected old stories and styles to create new ones. Anti-colonial movements rejected foreign control. Revolutionaries rejected the capitalist global economy. And authoritarians began to reject the global order. It was a way to increase their own power. The disillusionment that came after the war did as much to shape the world as the fighting had.