The Price We Paid By Failing to Mourn the Dead in WW I
Ben Macintyre, in the London Times (Nov. 7, 2004):
... The scholarly landscape of the Great War has been more thoroughly churned up than any in history: we know about the war of tactics and blunder, of donkeys and lions, boredom and muddy death. Yet there is one aspect of the war that remains oddly suppressed, partly because the participants themselves preferred not to discuss it: namely the vast legacy of multigenerational sorrow left by the carnage.
In an extraordinary new study, 14-18: Understanding the Great War, the French historians Antoinette Becker and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau argue that European society has never fully come to terms with the sheer scale of the personal bereavement involved: ten million dead soldiers, perhaps six million orphans and three million widows. Scarcely a family in Europe was untouched by loss, yet often the sadness was repressed, or channelled into official forms.
Governments deliberately set out to prevent excessive public grieving, since this might have called into question the reasons for the war. "It was one of the hidden objectives of the postwar commemorations to forbid protracted mourning," write Becker and Audoin-Rouzeau. The bereaved were offered a clipped, understated epitaph written by Rudyard Kipling, and a headstone in one of the 2,500 neat British graveyards on the battlefields: each fallen hero with his own corner of a foreign field. (This, too, was part of the memorial myth: most of the dead were buried in mass graves, and what usually lay under the headstone was not "forever England", but just another bit of France or Belgium.) The vast majority of families never had a body to bury, and public anguish was seen as unpatriotic, undermining the heroism of the martyrs. The combatants themselves preferred not to talk of what they had seen and done. Children between the wars knew better than to ask: "What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?" And if they did ask, Daddy usually couldn't bring himself to tell them.
This "failure to mourn" may be the single most powerful psychological legacy of that war. An entire generation was denied catharsis, despite bereavement on an epic scale, and buried its sorrow and guilt in a pile of monumental statuary, euphemism and stiff upper-lips. The worst case of collective post-traumatic stress disorder the world had ever known was never treated, never even acknowledged. In the face of such willing amnesia, recalling what the war was actually like required an effort of imagination, and the discipline of the poets.
The emotional cauterisation of the Great War surely explains why, in an age no longer afraid of emotion, we are fascinated by a conflict that is now on the most distant tip of living memory, but still horribly modern....
... The scholarly landscape of the Great War has been more thoroughly churned up than any in history: we know about the war of tactics and blunder, of donkeys and lions, boredom and muddy death. Yet there is one aspect of the war that remains oddly suppressed, partly because the participants themselves preferred not to discuss it: namely the vast legacy of multigenerational sorrow left by the carnage.
In an extraordinary new study, 14-18: Understanding the Great War, the French historians Antoinette Becker and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau argue that European society has never fully come to terms with the sheer scale of the personal bereavement involved: ten million dead soldiers, perhaps six million orphans and three million widows. Scarcely a family in Europe was untouched by loss, yet often the sadness was repressed, or channelled into official forms.
Governments deliberately set out to prevent excessive public grieving, since this might have called into question the reasons for the war. "It was one of the hidden objectives of the postwar commemorations to forbid protracted mourning," write Becker and Audoin-Rouzeau. The bereaved were offered a clipped, understated epitaph written by Rudyard Kipling, and a headstone in one of the 2,500 neat British graveyards on the battlefields: each fallen hero with his own corner of a foreign field. (This, too, was part of the memorial myth: most of the dead were buried in mass graves, and what usually lay under the headstone was not "forever England", but just another bit of France or Belgium.) The vast majority of families never had a body to bury, and public anguish was seen as unpatriotic, undermining the heroism of the martyrs. The combatants themselves preferred not to talk of what they had seen and done. Children between the wars knew better than to ask: "What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?" And if they did ask, Daddy usually couldn't bring himself to tell them.
This "failure to mourn" may be the single most powerful psychological legacy of that war. An entire generation was denied catharsis, despite bereavement on an epic scale, and buried its sorrow and guilt in a pile of monumental statuary, euphemism and stiff upper-lips. The worst case of collective post-traumatic stress disorder the world had ever known was never treated, never even acknowledged. In the face of such willing amnesia, recalling what the war was actually like required an effort of imagination, and the discipline of the poets.
The emotional cauterisation of the Great War surely explains why, in an age no longer afraid of emotion, we are fascinated by a conflict that is now on the most distant tip of living memory, but still horribly modern....