#modris eksteins

Constellation No. 45

Total Art, Total War

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Even if a [WWI soldier] thought he was functioning normally, life in the line demanded so much menial work – repairing trenches, digging new latrines, going on wiring parties, standing sentry duty, cleaning equipment, hunting rats and lice – that he rarely had time or energy to contemplate meaning and purpose in the war. Officers censoring letters found the task excruciatingly dull because of the mundane contents of virtually all letters. Material concerns – references to meals, cigarettes, clothes, equipment, and a host of such irritants as weather and vermin – dominated; emotions rarely transcended trite sentimentality; and the war as a whole was usually described in platitudes. Even a sensitive observer like Roland Dorgelès admitted that 'the most profound impressions came to me later, with some distance. On the spot, I attended to small matters and this detail often prevented me from judging the whole.' Preoccupied in the trenches by the mass of details – ‘crushed,’ as André Bridoux put, 'by the necessity of the hour’ – and denied precise information about the course of the war on other fronts, men found it difficult to assemble a coherent picture of the war as a whole. This is one of the reasons that a novel like Henri Barbusse’s 'Le Feu’ was passed around and read so eagerly when it appeared in 1916. Men craved some wider vision of the war. Most went through the war like blind men.

Marc Boasson referred to the ‘automatisme anesthésiant’ that the trench experience induced. Fritz Kresiler remarked on the ‘strange psychological, almost hypnotic, state of mind’ one lapsed into. General Pétain saw innocent youths entering the ‘furnace of Verdun’ for the first time feigning lightheartedness and indifference. When the survivors came out they had expressions ‘frozen by a vision of terror.’ Shell shock or neurasthenia was the term eventually applied to extreme cases of this condition, but army staffs and medical officers were slow to admit to such a condition. Lieutenant Colonel Jack of the 2nd West Yorkshires noted in his diary in November 1916 the case of one of his officers who served with the battalion in France since November 1914 and who now was clearly suffering from nervous exhaustion: 'I… reported him to Higher Command as worn out, and requested that he be sent home for a change from battles. The curious reply came that there was no such thing as a soldier being 'worn out’ and my application was refused.’ If the military was reluctant to recognize shell shock, the civilians had no inkling whatsoever of the condition. Garfield Powell, incensed during the Somme offensive by the platitudinous rubbish spouted by politicians, suggested they all be required to spend a week in the trenches: 'Shell shock! Do they know what it means? Men become like weak children, crying and waving their arms madly, clinging to the nearest man and praying not to be left alone.’ That many, perhaps even the majority of front-line troops in major battle areas suffered from some degree of shell shock may not be a wild hypothesis. As the French soldier-poet Charles Vildrac put it: '… the man who has tripped Between death’s legs and then Recovers himself and breathes again, Can only laugh or weep: He has not the heart to mourn.’

‘The storm has died away,’ said Paul Valéry in a lecture at Zürich in 1922, ‘and still we are restless, uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty.’ He spoke about all the things that had been injured by [WWI]: economic relations, international affairs, and individual lives. ‘But among all these injured things,’ he stated, 'is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded… It doubts itself profoundly.’

Art had become more important than history. History belonged to an age of rationalism, to the eighteenth and particularly the nineteenth century. The latter century had shown great respect for its historians. The Guizots, Michelets, Rankes, Macauleys, and Actons were read and appreciated, especially by a bourgeoisie bent on expansion and integration. Our century has, by contrast, been an antihistorical age, in part because historians have failed to adapt to the sentiments of their century but even more so because this century has been one of dis-integration rather than integration. The psychologist has, as a result, been more in demand than the historian. And the artist has received more respect than either.

The suggestion in these encomia is that Paris has somehow managed to harness its discordant urban energies -- its crush of humanity, its conflicts of class, its concentrations of greed and despair -- and to deal with its physical problems in such a way as to produce a rich and exhilarating spiritual effect. Starting in the middle of the last century, the city had indeed done much to encourage such an image: from the extensive improvements to the city under the guidance of Louis Napoleon's prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, to the repeated organization of lavish and expensive world expositions, to the architectural additions and improvements made by people like Viollet-le-Duc, to the building of the Eiffel Tower and Sacre Coeur, to the relatively lax censorship laws, which permitted entertainment and publications that would have had little chance of survival elsewhere in Europe, and, finally, to the intentionally ambiguous morality, a morality, not found elsewhere in Europe, that tolerated a street life of absinthe, cafes, and girls.