Europe and the centenaries of the Great Tragedies of 1916

With our recent concentration on the local events in Ireland in 1916 most Irish people have overlooked the centenary of some of the events in the Great War itself. 

The recent commemorations of both the Battle of Jutland and the Battle of Verdun, both to be counted with the first day of the Somme (a day that is recalled in Ireland) and Passchendaele. These months in 1916 were also critical for they saw the Kingdom of Italy joining in, followed by the USA in early 1917.  

At Jutland some 8,000 sailors lost their lives in the ineffectual clash of the rival dreadnoughts of Britain and Germany – the much vaunted super-fighting machines turned out to be less effective than had been hoped for – which is often the way with the what are now called “defensive weapons systems” – no  one ever calls them ‘weapons of war’ any more. 

The Battle of Verdun was fought continuously between the French and the Germans between February and December 1916. In 299 days of fighting the losses amounted to around 750,000 soldiers on both sides, according to some historians; the true figures are uncertain even now. In the end of the struggle nothing availed: the two sides were back where they started.  

The generals in charge, Petain and Falkenhayn, had wasted the youth of a European generation – an example of the military mind of both regular and irregular armies that one more push will do it. It was a hellish experience captured by French painter George Leroux in his masterpiece L’Enfer. 

Inevitably this terrible affair marked the literary mind of that generation. One of these was the novel Verdun (1938) by Jules Romains (the eighth novel in the series The Men of Good Will). 

This was described as “the most adult novel written about the First World War” by one American critic – a comment worth pondering, as the pathos of the rankers’ deaths is lauded while the criminality of the leaders and generals often ignored.

Insights

Romains seems to others to fuse the detachment of a social scientist with the insights of a creative artist. On the German side Arnold Zweig published Education Before Verdun (1935), in which the events of the long drawn out battle are seen from the opposite trenches. 

The publications dates of these books are significant. During the Great War part of the books were written from a patriotic point of view – “the old lie” as the poet called it. In England it was not until the publication of Goodbye to All That by the Anglo-Irish poet Robert Graves that a true view of the experience was given by a writer, that book beginning the great stream of novels by Siegfried Sassoon, Lewis, Manning, O’Flaherty, Barbusse, Remarque and so many others around the world.

Guy Chapman, the historian, author of A Passionate Prodigality (1933) about his own war experiences, also edited a massive anthology called Vain Glory (1937) “a miscellany of the Great War written by those who fought on all sides and all fronts”. This includes a great deal of what would be called literature, but it is all so filled with the voices of the common people, of all races and classes. This important book, running to 762 pages, was reprinted for the centenary of 1918, but has now vanished from sight, which is a pity.

Trauma

One thing all these books emphasise is the traumatic or rather post traumatic experience of war. When I was writing about Liam O’Flaherty it became clear that he never really recovered from the head wound he got at Langemarck in 1914.

It is this mental health aspect of the war which historians can clearly see affected the late 1920s and the increasing tensions of the 1930s. Europe had not learned from the war and was busy preparing for another, influenced by nationalism.

Here in Ireland, however, we have never really faced up to this mental trauma of a generation. 

True many of the directly involved in dreadful events here and in Europe were among those driven into exile by the social and economic circumstances of the Free State, but enough remained to cast a long shadow over minds deeply affected by what they had seen and what they had done, especially in our Civil War. There were few heroes in that struggle: vain glory yet again.   P.C.