THE GREAT WAR (1914-1918)

Since 1907, Europe was divided between two power blocs: The Triple Alliance
of Germany, Austria, Hungary and Italy and the entente cordiale (triple
entente) comprising France, Russia and Great Britain. Interlocking agreements
pledged the contracting parties to offer assistance if attacked. Crisis took place
on June 28, 1914 when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-
Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo (Bosnia). A member of the
Serbian nationalist organization "Black Hand" killed the Archduke and his wife.
The attack triggered a fatal series of events that led to the war. Powers
faithfully fulfilled their diplomatic commitments and the crisis quickly went
from a local incident to a general war in Europe.

Everyone thought the war would be a fast and short conflict, in which, of
course, the British nation would win, demonstrating its power. Naive soldiers
even smiled on their way to the front lines and military headquarters made
plans expecting a quick and easy defeat of the enemy.

The first two years of war saw a massive recruitment drive masterminded by
Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. Starting just days after the
declaration of war (August 1914), he appealed to British men with a powerful
propaganda campaign. As the army relied on volunteers, the British
government had to use propaganda to justify the war to the public and to help
promote recruitment. The main goal of this propaganda was to convince
people that their sacrifices would be highly rewarded.

Recruitment centres were set up across the country, and millions of posters
were printed encouraging men to join up. Propaganda played a key role in
WWI. It was utilised to help recruit soldiers, motivate the armed forces, and
maintain support on the Home Front. Propaganda took various forms,
including cartoons, literature and film, though posters were perhaps the most
widely disseminated and instantly recognisable examples.

By virtue of being an island kingdom, no part of Great Britain’s national home

territory was invaded, although there was a persistent concern over a possible
invasion, and attacks by German warships and aircraft took place from 1914
onwards. The British saw this as a defensive war, despite the fact that Great
Britain had not itself been attacked: a war against German militarism and in
defence of wider British security and the principles of international law. Britain
had promised to defend Belgium under the Treaty of London of 1839 so, when
Germany attacked France through Belgium (neutral), the British government
declared war on Germany. The nation was told that it was defending the weak
(Belgium) against the strong (Germany) and that it was fighting for democracy
and freedom. Decision was also supported by news of German troops
committing massacres against defenceless civilians. War was seen as a
patriotic, glorious and chivalric pursuit.

As the German advance in Belgium progressed, British newspapers started to

publish stories on German atrocities: accounts of rape and bizarre mutilations
flooded the British press (the German invasion started to be referred to as the
“rape of Belgium”). Thus, the British were encouraged to hate Germany and
desire its destruction. As a result, when Germany offered to make peace in
1916, neither the British nor the French government welcomed the idea. Both
were prisoners of the public feelings they had helped to create.

The middle part of the war, 1916 and 1917, was dominated by continued
trench warfare. Both sides had built a series of trenches that went from the
North Sea and through Belgium and France. Soldiers fought from dug-in
positions, striking at each other with machine guns, heavy artillery, and
chemical weapons. The land between the two enemy trench lines was called
“No Man’s Land.” This land was sometimes covered with barbed wire and land
mines.

While in the trenches, life had an appalling, monotonous schedule,

intermittently interrupted by infrequent attacks. Life in the trenches was often
miserable. Rainstorms produced deep puddles and thick mud, and sanitation
was a constant problem. Sometimes removing dead bodies from trenches or
the surrounding area was impossible. Lice, rats, and other unpleasant
creatures were always present. Occasionally soldiers would be ordered “over
the top” of their trench to attack the enemy. They would jump out of their
trench and sprint across the area between opposing trenches, called no-man’s-
land. As they ran, many were cut down by enemy machine guns. Thousands of
soldiers on both sides died in no-man’s-land, their bodies left where they fell.
Neither the Allies nor the Central Powers were able to make significant
advances past the enemy’s trenches. It was nearly impossible to capture an
enemy trench, protected as it was by machine guns, rows of barbed wire, and
armed soldiers. As a result, trench warfare turned into a stalemate. Countless
troops died in the trenches, with little real effect on the war.

Each side turned to new weapons and technology to win the war. Poison gas
was one of the new weapons used in the war. Different types of gas could
blind, choke, or burn the victims. Gas killed or injured thousands of people, but
its value was limited (chlorine gas, mustard gas).

When you first encounter mustard gas, you may not even know anything is
about to affect you. The best way to detect mustard gas is through smell:
notice a funny smell. Even under heavy doses, however, their noses adapted to
the smell quickly, giving them the impression that the gas had dissipated. Have
you ever noticed you can't smell something, be it good or bad, after you've
been sniffing it for a few minutes? The same principle applies during a mustard
gas attack.

Another gas was chlorine whose characteristic was its green colour; victims of
a chlorine attack would choke. The gas reacts quickly with water in the airways
to form hydrochloric acid, swelling and blocking lung tissue, and causing
suffocation. (Owen - poetry)

The killing capacity of gas was limited — only 3% of combat deaths were due to
gas — however, the proportion of non-fatal casualties was high and gas
remained one of the soldiers' greatest fears. A change in wind direction, for
example, could blow the gas back toward the troops who had launched it. Also,
both sides developed gas masks, which provided some protection. Other new
weapons were far more effective. For example, rapid-fire machine guns came
into wide use during the war. Modern industry also produced artillery and
high-explosive shells with enormous destructive power.

The poetry of World War I closely reflects the attitudes that many soldiers had
toward the war. Literature and warfare went hand in hand during World War I.
Many of the war poets composed their poems while sitting in the trenches
waiting for a battle to begin.
 1) The first poems (Rupert Brooke) brim with the confidence of soldiers
who believe that they are embarking on a glorious adventure. For the
first year or two of the war, many poems spoke of honor, glory, and
patriotism; they compared the duties of modern soldiers with those of
warriors celebrated in the epic poems of the ancient Greeks. Yet the
horror of the continuing war began to reshape war poetry, just as it
reshaped the attitudes of everyone involved in the war.

2) As the war wore on, poets (such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon)
began to write bitter, cutting verses about the horror of war and the
failure of patriotic visions. These are poems of harsh disillusionment and
indictment of war. The authors seem to realize that there is no higher or
chivalric calling to war but merely a bitter struggle to survive. The change
reflected in these poems is believed to mark the emergence of modern
literature, which focuses more on the perceptions of common people
than earlier literature does.

Rupert Brooke

His work reveals the English political propaganda during the pre-war years
which celebrated the war and emphasized the nobleness of fighting for one’s
nation, luring young men to join the military.

The most eloquent proof of the effectiveness of Brooke's poetry as public

statement is the extent to which it was exploited by politicians for patriotic
purposes. They used Brooke's poems as a form of war propaganda,
immortalizing him as the young warrior keen to lay down his life for his
country.

The irony in his work is that he didn’t see the horrors of war. Thus, his patriotic
poems represent an idealistic picture of war, devoid of tragic death, mutilations
and destruction.

Wilfred Owen - "The true poets must be truthful"

Owen’s poems are individual expressions of intense experience mainly because
he had first-hand experience of war and death. His poems are rooted in the
terribly distressing experience of a young officer in the trenches, who bears
witness to the ordeal of his men. The atrocities of war, the sheer waste of
human lives, the after-effects of war - both physical and psychological - were
some of his favourite themes. His main aim in writing war poetry was to instill
loathing for the atrocities and bestialities of war, to make people aware of what
was really happening. Hence the vivid, even graphic descriptions of desolate
landscapes and unrecognizable corpses both human and animal and the fear of
agonizing death.

Siegfried Sassoon –

His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirized the
patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon’s view, were responsible for
prolonging without valid purpose a jingoism-fueled (extreme patriotism) war.

Sassoon’s experiences with the realities of war horrified him, such that the
tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a
Romantic sweetness, his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant
music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience lulled
by patriotic propaganda. He applies bitter irony, and masterly use of direct
speech to attack the old men of the Army, Church, and Government whom he
held responsible for the miseries and murder of the young. Details such as
rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks
of his work at this time, and this philosophy of “no truth unfitting” had a
significant effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.

Isaac Rosenberg

Rosenberg’s poems are characterized by a profound combination of

compassion, clarity, stoicism, and irony.

Most of his poems were written out of his experience in the trenches; he
shared with thousands of other recruits the miseries of life in the trenches. But
in his case these were magnified by his small stature, the bullying he suffered
as a Jew, his ill health, and his absentmindedness, leading to punishment for
forgetting orders.

‘‘Rosenberg's poems from the front show him to have absorbed the great
tradition of English pastoral poetry, but his tone is different: more impersonal,
informal, ironic, and lacking the indignation characteristic of the work of
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.’’ (Jon Stallworth)
Edward Thomas

He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal

directly with his war experiences. He wrote no poems about fighting or about
life in the trenches. Actually, Thomas’s attitude to the war is devoid of Brooke’s
heartfelt patriotism, Owen’s bitterness, or Sassoon’s sarcasm.

His attitude to the war is a far cry from the enthusiasm prevalent particularly at
the beginning of the Great War and in its initial stages. Thomas does not feed
on the general mood, and the war issue for him remains beyond the domain of
the national debate: he adopts a stance of his own, which confirms acceptance
of the state of affairs without excessive emotional or patriotic commitment.

Conclusions:

The First World War destroyed empires, created numerous new nation-states,
encouraged independence movements in Europe’s colonies, forced the United
States to become a world power and led directly to Soviet communism and the
rise of Hitler. Diplomatic alliances and promises made during the First World
War, especially in the Middle East, also came back to haunt Europeans a
century later. The balance of power approach to international relations was
broken but not shattered. It took the Second World War to bring about
sufficient political forces to embark on a revolutionary new approach to inter-
state relations.

The human cost of the First World War was horrendous. More than 20 million
people, both military and civilian, died in the war. An entire generation of
young men was wiped away. It is tragic to consider all of the lost potential, all
of the writers, artists, teachers, inventors and leaders that were killed in ‘the
war to end all wars.’ But although the impact of the First World War was
hugely destructive it also produced many new developments in medicine,
warfare, politics and social attitudes.

Modern surgery was born in the First World War, where civil and military
hospitals acted as theatres of experimental medical intervention. Blood banks
were developed after the discovery in 1914 that blood could be prevented
from clotting. The First World War also led doctors to start to study the
emotional as opposed to the physical stress of war. Shell shock and traumatic
shock were identified as common symptoms.

The war also had major implications for the class structures in Europe. The
decline of the upper classes was further hastened by the introduction of broad
universal suffrage in Europe. The extension of the franchise, coupled with an
explosion in trade unionism, afforded the working classes greater political and
social representation.

The horrors of the Great War also gave an impulse to Christian socialism with
the rally cry of ‘never again’. It also forced women into jobs that had previously
been a male preserve. Many of the women whom the war effort had forced
out of domestic service and into factories found themselves unwilling to
relinquish their new independence. The War thus gave a boost to demands for
women’s emancipation.

The disillusionment that grew out of the war contributed to the

emergence of modernism, a genre which broke with traditional ways of
writing, discarded romantic views of nature and focused on the interior
world of characters. In the visual arts, the avant-garde movements
(Cubism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism) challenged the
traditional ways of expression and proposed exploring new artistic
methods, or experimenting with new techniques.