Let us start with two images. The first dates back to Saturday October 21st 1905. It is a panoramic photograph of Trafalgar Square – the centre of the largest empire the world has ever known. Rain is falling hard but the belligerent crowds there are singing, dancing and making merry. Their attentions are focused on Nelson’s Column, which is decorated specially for the occasion with flowers, bunting and Union Flags that flicker in the wind. The occasion, of course, is the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. And this was how wars used to be remembered.

I watched the second image live on BBC One the Sunday before last. It also showed – in similarly grim autumnal weather – a group of Londoners commemorating a war that had been fought a century earlier. And although the events took place just a few hundred yards apart, they could not have been more different: the grand monument to a victorious Admiral had become a modest tomb for the anonymous dead; the tickertape, bunting and flag-waving had been replaced by funereal poppy wreaths; and there were no longer any jingoistic songs, chants and fanfares. There was only silence.

You could be forgiven for thinking we had been defeated in the First World War. But the three long hours we have stood silent since the Armistice has surely been sufficient to learn that much more was lost in its winning. We all know those wretched stories – burnished with decades of over-use – about naive and adventurous young men volunteering for active service, waving farewell to their families convinced they would be back for Christmas, and ending their lives as screaming soldiers floundering in limb-littered, pestiferous trenches.

But it was not just the fathers, the sons, the husbands and the brothers that we lost – it was all those optimistic beliefs that died with them: that wars were always worth fighting, that a nation was always worth the sacrifice, that God was on the side of the victor, and that the world could only ever get better. After the war these once proud convictions sounded like the inane ravings of a civilization that could only be described as “an old bitch gone in the teeth”.

Perhaps, as Paul Fussell once warned us, “every war is worse than expected”. But in its iconic conversion of doomed innocence into irredeemable experience the Great War quickly became modern Europe’s ‘original sin’ as well as a unique emblem of the futility of all war. It is this brutal alchemy of the spirit that explains the unmistakable difference between the memorial ceremonies of 1905 and 2009 – from victory as carnival to victory as funeral. And it is this that also explains why, like some ancient Eastern tyrant, the 1914-18 war still insists on retaining the ‘Great’ in its title.

But was the war really that great? After all, it only killed 2 per cent of the British population – no more than emigrated in the four years before it and considerably less than the victims of Spanish Flu after it. Yet we do not talk of a ‘lost generation’ when we discuss those events. Indeed, probably very few of us are aware that they even took place. The crucial difference is this: only the war has been mythologized by artists, memoirists and historians. Our rituals of remembrance today participate in the ongoing construction of that myth. But myths, of course, are not realities, and our apocalyptic formulations of the war are just as bombastic as the heroic accounts of Homer, Herodotus and Tennyson that they always aspired to contradict.

I am not suggesting that the First World War was an insignificant detour in European history. In the United Kingdom we still live with its legacy every day, and not only because it catalyzed Irish independence, gave women the vote and delivered the knockout blow to our long tradition of a liberal State. Even those who are flummoxed twice yearly by daylight saving time or struggle to find a pub open after 11pm ultimately owe their inconveniences to the conflict. Those who objected to the war in Iraq are also the unconscious inheritors of a pacifist tradition that was inaugurated on the banks of the Somme.

The question we should really be asking is why, almost a hundred years down the line, the Great War still so disproportionately haunts our cultural imaginations, and our national identity. Why, for instance, does that famous valedictory sequence of the Blackadder protagonists going ‘over the top’ resonate with so many of us so profoundly? Why does Remembrance Sunday – an event that gains popularity with every year – continue to feel (incorrectly) like a commemoration of that conflict alone? And why can most of us recite whole passages by Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon but not name a single poet of the Second World War?

I suspect the answer is not quite as democratic as those countless tombs to ‘unknown soldiers’ suggest. Because a particularly marked consequence of the war was the disproportionate damage it did to the British elites. Countless estates that had passed nimbly through the generations for centuries lost their heirs; twenty-two MPs (and the sons of Herbert Asquith, Andrew Bonar-Law and Stanley Baldwin) died on active service; thousands of public schoolboys graduated into an eternal Gap Year; and of the many Oxbridge undergraduates who joined the forces as junior officers a staggering 25 per cent were killed in action – double the national average.

It was precisely these groups that codified our understandings of the war: Brooke and Sassoon were alumni of King’s and Clare colleges in this city, while Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, R.C. Sherriff, Vera Brittain and Laurence Binyon studied at Oxford. The ‘lost generation’, then, refers not to the death of the average Tommy but rather to the depopulation of the country’s privileged classes; those starlets who, so custom had it, were destined to be leading the Empire into a glorious future. In mourning the evaporation of their own social influence, these unrepresentative groups became instrumental in shaping the way that all of us remember the conflict today.

As we approach the centenary of the First World War it is more necessary than ever to evacuate the miasma of myth from its wreckage. The deaths of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch in July this year (the latter so beautifully marked by Radiohead’s tribute to him) leave just three veterans of the conflict still alive: Claude Stanley Choules, Frank Woodruff Buckles, and John Henry Foster Babcock. As the months proceed, we are inching ever closer to a decisive historical moment when, at a hospital, under a bed-sheet or in a well-worn armchair, the Great War will slip quietly but definitively out of living memory.

 

Dr James Fox is a Research Fellow at Churchill College and a member of the History of Art & Architecture Department. He has published widely on the First World War, and is currently writing a monograph on the subject.