Two Wars and the Long Twentieth Century
By Drew Gilpin Faust
A
hundred years ago this past August, Europe exploded in a conflagration
that came to engulf the world in a new kind of war. The Great War, it
was called, until a subsequent and even more devastating conflict made
it seem perhaps just the first in a series, part of a new genre of human
destruction and cruelty.
But as we think about the Great War and its meaning, and as we consider the history both of warfare and of modern society, we should remember another war that we are also in the midst of commemorating. A hundred and fifty years ago this past September, fifty years before the Great War began, William Tecumseh Sherman took Atlanta, a much coveted Union objective. It was the fourth year of a war whose devastation no one had anticipated and which no one could have imagined. Sherman’s victory left him poised for what became his infamous March to the Sea, initiated just weeks later. His determination to make civilians—“old and young, rich and poor”—feel “the hard hand of war” has made his march notorious, and indeed revolutionary, in the annals of warfare, a symbol of the new levels of destructiveness made possible by changed technologies, economies, and societies.
A case can be made that the American Civil War anticipated, in important ways, the transformations that have so often been attributed to the years between 1914 and 1918. The Civil War might well be viewed as the beginning of a “long twentieth century”: in its introduction of a scale of death that came to be associated with a later era, in what Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, historians of the First World War, have called warfare’s new combination of “industrial firepower and logistics with the fighting power and staying power that nationalism could generate”; in its mobilization of mass armies through the novel introduction of conscription; in its associated reliance on citizens both in battle and on the home front to sustain the conflict; and in a resulting emergence of new conceptions of citizenship and its privileges, which affected both the living and the dead. The violence of the American Civil War interrupted an age that saw itself as one of growing benevolence and humanitarianism, introducing a startling awareness of man’s capacities for destruction that found its terrible fulfillment between 1914 and 1918.
When I began exploring
this comparison, I was struck by the similarity of two numbers. The best
calculation of the number of men from the British Isles who died in the
Great War is 722,785. Although records from the Civil War are
inaccurate and incomplete, the most recent and sophisticated analyses
indicate that approximately seven hundred and fifty thousand soldiers,
from the North and the South, perished between 1861 and 1865. The size
of the British population in 1914 was somewhat larger than that of the
United States in 1860, so the percentage of loss in the two countries
differed: about 1.6 per cent in Britain and about 2.5 per cent in the
United States. But to think of these two wars in terms of the similar
numbers of foreshortened lives, and of the resulting circles of mourners
and bereaved, was revelatory. So let us take these numbers as a
starting point, as a shared foundation of loss, and as a way into
exploring two wars through the lens of two nations, two societies that
have come to regard them as defining moments.
More
Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars
combined, from the Revolution through Vietnam. The death toll was both
stunning and unanticipated by combatants who, in both the North and the
South, had at the outset expected the conflict to be of short duration
and little human cost. In Britain, the losses of the Great War were
similarly staggering and relentless, averaging four hundred and
fifty-seven dead a day through the war, and reaching an apogee on the
first day of the Battle of the Somme, in July, 1916, still the bloodiest
day in the history of the British Army, with more than nineteen
thousand dead and nearly forty thousand wounded or missing. This scale
of death, and the pervasive grief it inflicted, resulted from
significant innovations in warfare. So many people died partly because
so many were mobilized to fight. These were mass armies—as many as two
million Americans in arms in the eighteen-sixties and 5.7 million
British in the Great War—that were made possible by both ideology and
technology. In both conflicts, nationalism spurred the participation of
hundreds of thousands of civilian soldiers, who created armies quite
unlike any that had preceded them. The American North was fighting to
preserve a nation, the Confederacy to establish one, Britain to defend
one. These conflicts were cast and widely perceived as people’s wars,
even though that faith began to erode across Europe in the latter years
of the First World War. But it was nevertheless the infusion of ideology
and nationalist commitment into warfare that marked one of the most
significant dimensions of war’s new character.In both wars, however, enthusiasm proved insufficient to sustain the necessary manpower supply, and both Britain and America would, for the first time, introduce conscription. In the Civil War, the Confederacy adopted an initial conscription bill in April, 1862, and the Union followed eleven months later. Britain was a year and a half into the Great War when it passed the Military Service Bill of 1916. About fifty-seven per cent of those who served were drafted, a far higher percentage than had been the case in the United States half a century earlier. Over all, about a quarter of the adult male population in Britain entered the military, compared with three-quarters of white men of military age in the South and forty per cent in the Union. But, in both Britain and America, the many millions of men who joined the military created the conditions for a new kind of warfare, as well as the necessity for a new understanding of citizenship and its privileges in the aftermath of such widespread sacrifice. In the United States, for example, the wartime courage and service of African-American soldiers played a critical part in the movement to expand the franchise and pass the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited denial of the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In Britain, the slogan “One Gun, One Vote” captured the public sentiment that led to the Representation of the People Act in 1918, tripling the size of the British electorate. Similar expansions of the franchise were enacted across Europe after the Great War.
Mass
mobilization was inseparable from another innovation that appeared for
the first time in America during the Civil War and, later, in the
British military experience in 1914: warfare, like the society that
produced it, had become industrialized. The railroad was central to both
conflicts, enabling unprecedented rapid resupply and movement of
armies, and reducing the decisiveness of battle. The telegraph
revolutionized battlefield communication. And industry was essential to
the production of new weaponry that shaped the character and deadliness
of both wars. As Herman Melville wrote in a poem about the Union
ironclad Monitor, a ship that seemed to change the very heart of naval
conflict:
… plain mechanic power
Plied cogently in War now placed—
Where War belongs—
Among the trades and artisans….
This was war without glory, war fought by “operatives,” mechanics, and their machines.No passion; all went on by crank,
Pivot, and screw,
And calculations of caloric.
The South Carolina planter and former U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond similarly understood the implications of the U.S.S. Monitor’s famous 1862 confrontation with the C.S.S. Virginia, formerly the Union ship Merrimack. “If that thing answers expectation it will be the greatest curse that has befallen man since the fall of Adam,” he wrote. “The Yankees can build 3 of these Machines to our 1, & take our Coast & Ports … & our only & poor recompense will be to shell their cities & coast. Horrible Warfare!” This was to be a war of civilizations, not just of armies and navies. It was also clear to Hammond that the Virginia’s victory in this particular naval battle would prove meaningless in the face of a new warfare of machines and industrial production, in which the North’s economic supremacy would carry the day no matter how valiant or dedicated the Confederate effort. The role played by naval blockades in both conflicts was testimony to both the centrality and the vulnerability of economies in shifting patterns of warfare.
Firepower and matériel would outweigh élan and courage in determining war’s outcome. In fact, élan and courage would prove, in many instances, to yield defeat and destruction rather than victory. In both the Civil War and the Great War, increased firepower exposed men to enhanced and extended peril, and rendered prevailing tactical thinking obsolete. In both circumstances, commanders’ continued attachment to the assault would prove costly and futile against newly deadly weaponry. Although ninety-four per cent of battlefield deaths in the Civil War were caused by the rifle, in the Great War it was artillery that inflicted sixty per cent of British fatalities—with an inhumanity that the London Times war correspondent Lt. Col. Charles Repington called the “butchery of the unknown by the unseen.” In both cases, technological advances achieved in the years just prior to the two conflicts made the weapons significantly more effective. Building on a trajectory of deadly innovation inaugurated with the Civil War’s Gatling gun, the machine gun joined rapid-fire, rifled artillery to augment the new lethality of the First World War battlefield. Increases in firepower created a changed tactical environment and, we can now say in hindsight, changed tactical requirements.
But neither Civil War nor First World War commanders could see so clearly. A British military instruction manual issued in 1915 took little apparent account of these transformations. “The bayonet,” it declared, “plays a most important part in modern warfare, and it is believed that it will only be by a series of bayonet assaults carried out by men skilled in the use of the weapon . . . that positions held by a brave and determined enemy can be captured.” Half a century earlier, many Civil War soldiers had discarded their bayonets along their marching routes, relieving their load of what they had come to regard as superfluous equipment. Fewer than one per cent of Civil War casualties resulted from bayonet wounds. In the First World War, they were so rare as to be statistically subsumed into a “miscellaneous” category that totalled 1.02 per cent, the official weapons manual notwithstanding. Soldiers reported the bayonet more useful for opening tin cans or drying clothes than as a weapon against enemy fire.
It is difficult now not to shake one’s head at the way that Britain, and indeed all of Europe, failed to learn the lessons of Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Fredericksburg, at how European officers and writers dismissed the Civil War as irrelevant—in the wonderful though perhaps apocryphal words attributed to the German commander Helmuth von Moltke, as little more than “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned.” The scale of death in both wars was inseparable from commanders’ delays in recognizing the implications for the comparative advantage of offense and defense that new weapon technology had introduced. When they caught on at last, armies in the Civil War moved to entrench, though we so closely associate the appearance of the trench in modern warfare with what famously occurred on the Western Front a hundred years ago. “Old-style assaults en masse had no place in a modern battlefield dominated by small arms and artillery fire,” comments William Philpott about the First World War’s tragic mistakes. He could have made the same observation about Pickett’s Charge.
Both the Civil War and the Great War evolved into wars of attrition. Individual battles lost decisiveness as they extended in time and space. By the spring of 1864, Grant knew that he outnumbered the Confederates and could risk greater losses until they had been bled dry. Spotsylvania, the Wilderness—the battles became almost indistinguishable, merging into a relentless campaign. He determined to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” and it did. Like the Battle of the Somme, which lasted from July until nearly the end of 1916, Grant’s death struggle with Lee endured for months.
Manufacturing the weaponry and supplying food and clothing for these armies and this relentless conflict required an industrial economy that made war the business not just of soldiers but of whole societies, of citizens and workers situated well beyond the battlefield. Women no longer simply endured war or tended to its victims—they were mobilized on fields and farms, to substitute for the hundreds of thousands of departed men, and as industrial workers, to sew uniforms to clothe the soldiers and to produce the weapons and ammunition to arm them. On the same day as the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, a massive explosion occurred at the Allegheny Arsenal, near Pittsburgh. Seventy-eight workers were killed; on what became the bloodiest battle day in American history, the dead included not just soldiers in Maryland but young women who also sacrificed their lives for the nation. More than half were never positively identified and were buried, like so many of their brothers and husbands on the battlefield, in mass graves. Explosions in Richmond, in 1863, and in Washington, D.C., in 1864, killed women and even children who had joined the war effort by filling cartridges (as many as twelve hundred per worker each day), finishing and sealing friction primers, and sewing cannon cartridge bags. In Britain during the First World War, women also worked in munitions production; by June, 1917, eighty per cent of the weaponry and ammunition for the British Army was made by Munitionettes, as the women were called. Safety conditions had not markedly improved in the half century since the Civil War, however. Dozens of women died of T.N.T. poisoning that turned their skin yellow, and explosions in Britain killed more than three hundred workers in the course of the war.
National economies and war production, in particular, came to depend on women in ways that were unprecedented in either American or British society. For women in both nations, the work was demanding and even dangerous, but it was also empowering. They, too, felt conscripted into service by the necessities of national survival; they, too, began to understand themselves more fully as citizens, with both responsibilities and rights. The postwar expansion of the franchise did not come so rapidly for women in the United States as it did for African-American men; women were not, to the dismay of suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, included in the Fifteenth Amendment. It would take another war to secure the vote for American women. In Britain, only women over thirty were included in the Representation of the People Act. But, given the violent opposition to female suffrage in Britain before 1914, it is hard not to regard the effects of the war as transformative. Total war created a demand for the participation of women as well as of men in the nation’s work. The war’s requirements for service and sacrifice would provide women with claims for inclusion and voice which may have been postponed but were not indefinitely denied.
The
need to mobilize populations to work and fight on behalf of the nation
brought another new element to war. Communications—propaganda, as we
might call it today—took on ever-increasing importance. The empowerment
of ordinary men and women included their greater access to information
and their new ability to make their viewpoints heard. Scholars of the
First World War have often observed that it was Britain’s first literate
war, the first in which most common soldiers could write home and
describe their experiences, uniting home and battlefront in a newly
close connection. In America fifty years earlier, men wrote without
censorship to loved ones behind the lines, leaving to posterity a record
of ordinary people that only the separations of warfare could have
produced. Schools were nearly universal in the North but less available
even to whites—and, of course, prohibited to slaves—in the South.
Nonetheless, literacy rates were high in both the Union and the
Confederacy: eighty-eight per cent of white men in the South, and
ninety-six per cent of white men in New England, could read and write.
Many soldiers who could not write themselves dictated letters home to
their comrades. Citizen soldiers had a foundation for their opinions,
and seized the means to express them: in letters, diaries, telegrams,
and camp newspapers. At home, civilians eagerly sought information about
the war and the experiences of loved ones far away in newspapers and
periodicals, which proliferated in the North and the South, despite the
Confederacy’s struggle to manufacture necessary paper and printing
supplies. In this war of fledgling mass communication, weaknesses in
industrial capacity exacted their toll well beyond the realm of
munitions and armaments. Lincoln understood well this new dimension of
war: “In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything,” he
remarked. “With it, nothing can fail, against it, nothing can succeed.”
Each
of these wars was marked, too, by different but strikingly parallel
technological advances in photography and film, which brought, in newly
powerful ways, the face of battle to the home front. The Civil War was
the first conflict in which photography played a significant role. There
had been some photographs in Crimea, but they in no way approached the
record of war that Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan,
and others produced between 1861 and 1865. The scale and logistics of
the American conflict were faithfully portrayed in visual
representations of military bridges and roads, the omnipresence of the
railroad, and the movements and massing of men and armies in campaign.
Photography could not yet capture the action of battle, but it rendered
the horror of its aftermath in indelible form: bloated bodies, severed
limbs, bloody corpses, the harvest of death that names and numbers could
scarcely portray. Civilians far from the front confronted war’s
realities in a manner and with an emotional force that had never before
been imagined. When Mathew Brady exhibited a series of photographs from
Antietam in New York, the Times observed, “If he has not
brought bodies and laid them in door-yards and along the streets, he has
done something very like it.” No longer was the battlefield a remote
reality; photography had brought the war home.By 1914, photography had become familiar. This later era’s innovation in representation was film, and war soon became its object. In 1916, the British government undertook a remarkable project, replete with the ironies of dashed expectations which have so often been seen as a central aspect of the First World War. Britain decided to create a propaganda film to illustrate the coming triumph in the much-anticipated summer offensive in the Somme. Two official cinematographers began accumulating footage in the trenches and behind the lines in France, illustrating extensive preparations for the battle. The film shows soldiers cheerfully assembling at the front, smiling and waving at the cameras as they march through French villages and the countryside, toward their promised victory. Knowing how many of them would be senselessly slaughtered in the coming days—there were sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Somme—I watched the flickering images with astonishment and horror. A seemingly endless variety of artillery—eighteen-pounders, sixteen-pounders, a sixty-pounder, and an array of differently sized howitzers and mortars—begin a bombardment that was confidently intended to clear a path into the midst of the German trenches. In fact, it failed to cut even the forbidding tangle of barbed wire that would pin the British assault in immobility. The advance of troops “over the top” on July 1st was staged by the filmmakers, but the aftermath of battle is all too real: soldier casualties from both sides are depicted, along with German prisoners, slaughtered horses, and even a dead dog, the favored pet of one military unit. All this in the middle of a landscape turned to moonscape, where no living thing has survived.
Despite the devastating reality of the British action on July 1st, the government was committed to showing the film as a morale booster, and endeavored to edit it accordingly. The cheerful waving soldiers remain, but the truth of war cannot be erased. The Daily Mirror described it as “a visualization of the hell that is war.” The film, which was called “The Battle of the Somme,” opened in August, 1916, in thirty-four London cinemas, and was released across Britain the following week—in twenty cinemas in Birmingham, in twelve in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in many more across the nation. Twenty million Britons, fully half the population, saw it during the following six weeks. One imagines them scanning the screen for a glimpse—perhaps the last—of a loved one, and recoiling from the suffering and destruction that can only have seemed too close and too real. “Here is the meaning of war,” one filmgoer wrote. “It is Death.” Frances Stevenson, who had lost a brother on the Western Front, summed it up: “I have often tried to imagine myself what he went through … but now I know, and I shall never forget.”
Never
forget. More than seven hundred thousand dead in Civil War America and
in First World War Britain, each dead soldier with what demographers
call an “entourage” of bereaved—wives, mothers, sisters, children,
neighbors, friends. “The dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or South or
North—ours all,” Walt Whitman intoned. Few Americans remained untouched.
As one Confederate soldier observed, “Death reigned with universal
sway.”
Death seemed to reign in Britain in 1918
as well. In 1945, looking back from the culmination of another war,
Hannah Arendt observed that confronting mass death had been the
“fundamental problem” in human consciousness in the aftermath of the
Great War. It was also a very immediate problem of policy—of burial and
commemoration—that grew directly out of the changed nature of warfare.Lincoln had dubbed the Civil War “a people’s contest,” and this phrase captures well one of the distinguishing aspects of the conflict. It was a war fought by citizen armies, mobilized in part through conscription and supplied and kept in the field by the efforts of whole populations. It was a war of ideology—for the Union, one based in a belief in democracy as “the last, best hope of earth” and in the rights of the common man. These citizen soldiers, these individuals who had fought for the nation, deserved to be named and remembered. They could claim rights in death as they had in life. In the Mexican War, the dead had received no official attention until 1850, two years after the conflict ended, when the federal government reinterred seven hundred and fifty soldiers in an American cemetery in Mexico City. These bodies represented only six per cent of the Americans who had died, and not one of them was identified.
But this was a “new era,” as an 1866 magazine essay calling for a system of national cemeteries proclaimed. “A Democratic Republic like ours, based on equality of the [human] race, and affirming justice for all … can not afford to pass by unheeded, however humble, those who have proven themselves by fierce and sturdy warfare in its behalf at once its best citizens and brave defenders.” Between 1866 and 1871, the United States designated units of soldiers awaiting demobilization to scour the Southern countryside searching for bodies and graves. Ultimately, they gathered and reburied more than three hundred thousand Union dead in seventy-four newly created National Cemeteries. The absence of established procedures for handling the dead during war, and the fact that soldiers did not carry any equivalent of dog tags, meant that many bodies could be identified with only, as Whitman put it, “the significant word Unknown.” But the search for information about these men was pursued with the same zeal as the search for their bodies, and fifty-four per cent of them were ultimately named.
Citizens who had risen by the millions to protect Britain in the First World War created a similar imperative of obligation to the dead, a departure in a country that had, a century earlier, buried the casualties of Waterloo in unmarked mass graves. In Britain after 1918, as in the United States fifty years earlier, the government for the first time assumed responsibility for burials, graveyards, and commemoration. The creation of the United States National Cemetery system between 1866 and 1871 had a direct parallel in the work of Britain’s Imperial War Graves Commission, first established in 1917 to introduce more regular processes for identifying, registering, and memorializing the dead than had prevailed during the first three years of war. As the British field marshal John French put it, “The care … of graves now assumes a national character.” The I.W.G.C. reinterred more than two hundred thousand bodies by the mid-nineteen-twenties. Only one in ten could be identified, and the remainder were buried as “Known Unto God.” In total, nine hundred and eighteen cemeteries were created on the Western Front.
The notion that soldiers should be treated equally in death, based on a conception of shared national sacrifice, held powerful sway in both American and British reburial efforts. Serried ranks of simple and identical white headstones mark battle deaths on both sides of the Atlantic. British officials confronted considerable opposition to their insistence that bodies could not be repatriated and that headstones be uniform. In a Britain where the fissures of class portrayed in “Upstairs/Downstairs” or “Downton Abbey” remained firmly in place, the Commission stood resolutely by the principle of equality in death; war and its casualties proved to be great levellers.
Honoring every citizen who had died for Britain required more than just graveyards, however. A massive monument erected by the British at Thiepval, in Picardy, records the names of some 72,198 men with no known graves—the Missing of the Somme. Menin Gate memorialized nearly fifty-five thousand men of the British Empire lost in the Ypres Salient. And there was one body that the I.W.G.C. gladly welcomed home. The Unknown Warrior exemplified all of the war’s losses, a focus for collective grief and catharsis. An anonymous citizen soldier, not a triumphant general, became the emblem of the war and of the shifts in national perception that it had brought. As David Crane observes in a recent book on Britain’s war losses, “A war that had started with the Times printing casualty lists of officers only had ended with a nameless, rank-less, classless soldier enshrined ‘among Kings’ ” in Westminster Abbey.
The Great War changed
attitudes and assumptions as well as practices in Britain, although the
extent of these transformations has generated considerable controversy,
much of it centered on the work of the literary critic and historian
Paul Fussell. In “The Great War and Modern Memory,” published in 1975,
Fussell declared that endless war had become a fundamental “condition”
of modern civilization. “There seems to be one dominating form of modern
understanding,” he wrote. “It is essentially ironic; and it originates
largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great
War.” The language of disillusion used by the poets of the Western
Front, along with their struggles to represent the incommunicable horror
of modern war—their shattered innocence, their rejection of what
Wilfred Owen called “the old lie,” that it is “sweet and proper to die
for one’s country”—became, in Fussell’s view, the hallmarks of a changed
consciousness that would define modernity. Fussell’s critics are
legion. They decry his “tendentious generalizations” and proclaim him
“spectacularly ignorant” of the military history of the war; they charge
him with exaggerating the discontinuities between pre- and postwar
eras; and they accuse him of making a few élite English poets the voice
of a nation and an era.
And
yet. The core of Fussell’s understanding continues to shape our
comprehension of what the Great War meant. Words like “chasm,”
“discontinuity,” and “rupture” were commonplace in contemporary
descriptions of the war’s impact, and they remain so now. As the
distinguished critic Samuel Hynes says about Britain after 1918, “The
gap in history [introduced by the war] had entered post-war
consciousness as a truth about the modern world.” The defining nature of
the First World War, the sense that it changed the world, is the
assumption that has fuelled Britain’s moving centennial commemorations
during these past months; it is a powerful motivation for the hundreds
of thousands of ceramic poppies that filled the moat at the Tower of
London last fall.Did the horrors of the American Civil War introduce any parallel shift in consciousness? Did the experience of the Civil War engender the disillusion, the irony, the crisis of representation that is so often associated with the First World War? In many ways, even in most ways, it did not. The late nineteenth century was, for the United States, a time of expanding power and wealth, a Gilded Age of confidence in which Victorian sentimentality and optimism prevailed even in face of the failures of Reconstruction, the war’s terrible losses, and the unresolved grief of so many bereaved. But there also began to emerge some evidence and appearance of the disillusion and doubt that we have tended to regard as characteristic of a later age.
“All Quiet on the Western Front” is perhaps the emblematic rendering of the Great War’s challenge to meaning, in its fragmented form, in its tragic force, and even in the irony of the title chosen by its English translator. In fact, that title echoes—unwittingly, I am sure, yet important nonetheless—a song that was widely popular among soldiers and civilians from both the North and the South, called “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight.” The song embraces the same irony—the disjuncture between the individual’s experience and the machinery of modern war—as the later novel. On the Potomac, in the words of the song, the death of “a private or two now and then / will not count in the news of the battle.” Perception contrasts with reality; the quiet of peace and safety is juxtaposed with the quiet of death; a human life no longer counts in the face of the calculations of total war. There are striking parallels between the nineteenth-century song and the twentieth-century novel, suggesting a presence, even in the Civil War era, of a sensibility that we—and even Fussell—might recognize and label as “modern.”
Evidence of this sensibility appears most prominently in some of the literary efforts that grew out of the American war. Ambrose Bierce enlisted in the Union Army at eighteen, and saw nearly four years of combat before a serious head wound ended his military service. His journalism and short stories reflect what he described as “visions of dead and dying” that haunted him all his life. There is no romance or heroism in his depiction of war, and his stories portray a world in which there is no certainty, in which things are rarely what they seem. In “Devil’s Dictionary,” he revised the very meanings undergirding language itself.
Herman Melville turned from prose to the fragmented language of poetry as he came to recognize that “none can narrate that strife.” The war, he believed, had been “an upheaval affecting the basis of things,” including literary form and language as well as human purposes and values. Doubt replaced belief; death could not promise redemption but merely posed a riddle “of which the slain / sole solvers are.”
Emily Dickinson produced an average of four poems a week during the war years, as battle extended its reach and influence even into her reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her “Triumph,” she wrote, “lasted till the Drums / Had left the Dead alone. … And then I hated Glory / And wished myself were They.” Glory, triumph—these words emptied in the face of the force and reality of Death, the deaths of young men she knew in Amherst, the deaths of the thousands of soldiers she read about in the newspapers delivered regularly to her door. Her religion became one that “doubts as fervently as it believes.”
None of these three writers should be seen as representative of widely held nineteenth-century views. They were, in fact, separated from others of their era by the very perceptions that connect them to the sensibilities of a later time. But these modernist foreshadowings, and their origins in the experience of war, are telling, and at least some of these writers’ perceptions about the inability of language to capture war are evident in the writings of ordinary Americans. As the Confederate soldier Reuben Allen Pierson explained to his father, after a battle in 1862, “Language would in no way express the true picture as it really was.” Oliver Wendell Holmes declared his experience of war “incommunicable.” A nurse on the front in Tennessee found that “there are times when the meaning of words seem to fade away; so entirely does our language fail to express the reality. This fact I never so fully realized as when attempting to depict the suffering, both mental and physical, which I have witnessed.” Suffering exceeded both expression and understanding. Such struggles with the inadequacies of language are widespread in writings from the First World War as well. As the soldier-poet Richard Aldington explained, echoing Holmes, “it was a question of trying to communicate the incommunicable.” The historian Modris Eksteins has put it vividly: “Meaning, like a huge artillery shell, had exploded into endless fragments.”
Only half a century separated these two wars. Many Britons and Americans knew both, as bookends of their lives. Henry James was twenty and living in New England when his younger brother was grievously wounded in the Civil War; he was seventy-one when the Great War broke out. Having long since abandoned the United States for London, he at last became a naturalized British subject soon after the fighting began. He regarded the conflict with horror, as an “abyss of blood and darkness,” a challenge to the most fundamental assumptions of “the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be … gradually bettering.” James had invested his life and work in the notion of human progress and civilization, in the thought of improvement and of lessons learned after the Civil War had exerted its devastating effects on his brother Wilky. But James, like so many others, would face disillusion. He was compelled to recognize that “reality is a world … capable of this.” War imposed on his life a changed meaning. He died in February, 1916. The war outlasted him.
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