‘At the Going Down of the Sun’ — Collective Loss and Collective Remembrance

Abstract

While we considered the ethics of fighting and combat in the previous chapter, the end of conflict meant that societies created and sustained narratives that offered species of justification, comfort and explanation for loss. The scale of the First World War and the number of fatalities endured by the combatant nations had a considerable transformative effect upon Western societies.1 Bureaucracy, technology and modern rationalism were brought to bear upon an armed struggle that had no previous parallel. In coming to terms with what happened during these years the central cultural and social experience was one of immense loss on an almost unprecedented scale. This was quickly moulded into something collective and shared. In assessing the character of this loss Jay Winter, the most perceptive of this subject’s recent historians, noted how those who survived the war cultivated and maintained an unaccountable and imperceptible relationship with the dead.2 This manifested itself in dreams, through war memoirs, paintings and war literature, which eventually confronted the terrifying new experience of the aftermath of total war. However, it also drew upon older narratives of the shocked and chastened returning soldier, which Winter suggests were as old as the Odyssey.3 Nonetheless there is also a more recent historiography, which is markedly less pessimistic of the war’s impact and influence, noting that British society did effectively remake itself after the conflict. Moreover this same historiography suggests that the ennobling and positive aspects of the conflict have been overwritten by excessive focus upon the war poets, the post-war slump, the unequivocal justness of the Second World War and subsequent anti-war readings of the conflict that come from a different time and context.4 These have served to place the First World War ‘outside history … unique in its dreadfulness’.5