Free Stranger Than We Can Imagine by John Higgs Page B

Christopher Clark argues that the protagonists of this conflict were sleepwalking into the abyss, ‘blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world’. There is no single villain we can blame for what happened. As Clark notes, ‘The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover theculprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol … Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime.’
    The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up in his attempt to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria following a failed grenade attack by Princip’s colleague, and gone to a café. It is often said that he got himself a sandwich, which would surely have been the most significant sandwich in history, but it seems more likely that he was standing outside the café without any lunch. By sheer coincidence the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave a surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.
    Europe plunged the world into a second global conflict a generation later. The Second World War produced art and literature that were resolute, determined and positive, from songs like ‘We’ll Meet Again’ to movies like
The Dam Busters
or
Saving Private Ryan
. They highlight a clear, unarguable sense of purpose, based around the central understanding that fascism had to be stopped whatever the cost. The First World War, in contrast, produced novels such as
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque or the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, all of which examined the war from a point of shocked, uncomprehending horror. The soldiers of the First World War had no comparisons in history to turn to for an explanation of what they had experienced. Remarque fought on the opposing side to Sassoon and Owen, but the questions that these soldiers wrestled with were the same. The experience of the war seems universal, regardless of which side of the trenches a soldier was on and regardless of whether it was recounted by an upper-class poet like Sassoon or a working-class war poet like Ivor Gurney. Much of the most important work did not appear until decades after the conflict, as people were still trying to make sense of their experience of war long after it ended.
    This difference in tone is highlighted by two classic war movies, which both tell a broadly similar story of captured officers attempting to escape from a prisoner of war camp. The names of these two films are enough to express their differing character. John Sturges’s 1967 film about Second World War Allied prisoners is called
The Great Escape
. Jean Renoir’s 1937 story of French First World War prisoners is called
La Grande Illusion
.
    With the exception of airmen such as the Red Baron, who won eighty dogfights up in the clouds far removed from life in the mud and trenches, the First World War did not generate popular, romanticised stories. It is instead remembered with static visual symbols – poppies, muddy fields, silhouetted soldiers, trenches, graves – rather than narrative. The closest it came were the spontaneous, unofficial Christmas truces that saw men from both sides leave the trenches, fraternise and play football together. What marked this incident as memorable was that it was not war itself, it was the opposite of war. This ceasefire has become the popular folk memory of the Great War, for who could romanticise the events of Gallipoli, Passchendaele or the Somme? The pointlessness of the conflict can be seen in the stoical humour of the soldiers, who would march to the trenches singing, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘We’re here