Understanding and Remembering the War Environment Technology and Change

Understanding and Remembering the War Environment Technology and Change

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Chapter 17
Understanding and Remembering
the War
This book has narrated the history of the First World War while highlighting
elements that pertain to technology and the environment. Geographical visions of
conquest, together with technological capabilities for war, inspired plans to attack and
divide other countries. Technologies such as aircraft, artillery observation, poison gas,
and submarines all predated the war, while during the war designers and
manufacturers improved them significantly. Even so, these improving technologies did
not do as much as classic environmental factors, such as the supply of food and
manpower, to change the course of the war. During the war, these environmental
factors were closely bound up with victory and defeat. Meanwhile, we have
considered evidence to suggest that people’s views of the environment and
technology changed. Modern technologies were now more likely to be treated with a
mixture of appreciation and horror, while the participants in the war began to see the
landscape as foreboding.
ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY, AND CHANGE
The experiences of the First World War changed many lives, but in some ways the
war had a limited impact on the global environment, insofar as it can be measured.
Around the world, crop production and industrial production rose, but increases can
be seen in light of broader trends. In the decades before the war, industrialization and
population growth were already having an impact on the environment, while
production tended to decline during the disruptions of the 1920s and the Great
Depression. For example, the historian Richard Tucker examined worldwide timber
production during the world wars. He found that, during the First World War, there
was increased production of forest products in Europe, North America, and the
tropical colonies. Some areas were subject to ruinous overlogging, but generally
speaking forests recovered during the 1920s.
[1]
There were a number of regions where battles were fought, ranging from
Eastern Europe to the Atlantic Ocean, which saw temporary but not lasting damage.
The main area of environmental devastation—the main environmental sacrifice zone of
the war—was concentrated in eastern France and Belgium, an area roughly the size
of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. In this zone, the landscape was completely
ruined. Trenches and craters scarred the land. Woodlands were destroyed, drainage
systems were damaged, and unexploded shells and decomposed corpses lay under
the ground. Even so, heavy postwar investment by the French government in
restoration efforts resulted in substantial progress by the outbreak of the Second
World War, during which much of the same land was damaged again. It is correct
that the Second World War set back the recovery. It is also true that farmers are still
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
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occasionally plowing up soldiers’ skeletons and unexploded shells, but on the whole
the Western Front has recovered.
During the war, there were not revolutionary changes to the environment. The
same might be said about technology. Most of the important weapons of the war,
such as small arms and artillery, had been developed before the war and were only
modified during the war. The same could be said about the main technologies of
transportation and communication, such as the automobile, the steamship, and the
telephone. In fact, the armies of the First World War relied most heavily on horses.
For example, in mid-1917 the British army owned 591,000 horses; 213,000 mules;
47,000 camels; and 11,000 oxen. Many of the horses and mules had been bought in
the United States and shipped to the Western Front, where they were used mainly for
transporting supplies. New technologies did appear, such as the tank, but these were
in such a rudimentary stage of development that they had only a limited usefulness.
The airplane developed very rapidly during the war, and so did a few other weapons,
such as poison gas. Still, we must remember that most casualties during the war may
be attributed to artillery, machine guns, and rifles, as well as illness from influenza and
other infectious diseases.
Old technologies remained important during the war, while people made few
changes to the environment that were irrevocable, even with increasingly destructive
military technologies. The greatest changes associated with the environment and
technology concerned people’s experiences and memories. The experience of trench
warfare and massive bombardments changed the way people saw technologies and
the landscape.
HUMANISTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE WAR
Before the war, there were certainly intellectuals like Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, and
Mahatma Gandhi who denounced modern technology, but for the most part people
associated new technologies with progress. The human experience of industrialized
war from 1914 to 1918 changed that view. The leading French cubist painter of the
war, Fernand Léger, famously painted abstract representations of wrecked airplanes,
prewar symbols of technological progress brought low and destroyed in war. He had
served as a stretcher-bearer, so he was particularly sensitive to destruction and
dismemberment. His most famous painting of the war, “The Card Party,” shows
abstract, shining, metallic French soldiers playing cards with their dismembered limbs.
The Russian artist Marc Chagall also experimented with cubism during the war. His
sketch “The Wounded Soldier” portrays a Russian soldier, his head bandaged and
cockeyed, glaring maniacally at the viewer.
Cubism’s antirealism seems appropriate for a war that shattered the lives of
many soldiers and civilians. In the disillusioned years after the war, cubism remained
a key form of representation. Another artistic movement from the prewar years that
was quite similar to cubism—futurism—became discredited. The founders of futurism,
the poet Filippo Marinetti and the artist Umberto Boccioni, worshipped the new
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
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technologies of transportation and communication that figured so prominently in the
first two decades of the twentieth century. They preached that technology, coupled
with violence, could transcend the human condition. The artists who followed them
resembled the cubists, in that they painted abstract, two-dimensional, and seemingly
disjointed images. The futurists differed from the cubists in their choice of subject: the
cubists tended to prefer portraits and still lifes, while the futurists attempted to
capture motion.
One young prewar futurist, the British artist C. R. W. Nevinson, became one of
the most interesting painters of the war. While serving as an ambulance driver in
1915, Nevinson painted futuristic scenes of war. In one painting, “The Machine-Gun,”
Nevinson shows a French machine-gun crew firing from a trench. An angular, twodimensional soldier pulls the trigger, seemingly at one with the technology, while
another shouts down the trench. In another famous painting, “A Bursting Shell,”
Nevinson abandons the human subject altogether and shows the rays of light and
darkness thrown off by a shell as it explodes in the sky. The technology of war is
certainly not elevated in Nevinson’s works of 1914 to 1916, but neither is it criticized.
Nevinson’s wartime experiences changed the nature of his painting. He began the
war with a futuristic appreciation of technology, but he ended the war by shifting to
more realistic portraits of human suffering, abandoning futurism’s abstraction and its
worship of technology. By the end of the war, he was working as an official
government war artist. His most famous paintings are realistic portraits of dead
soldiers on a devastated landscape. In “Paths of Glory,” painted in 1917, the bodies
of dead British soldiers lie in the mud near barbed wire, seemingly being sucked into
the ground. Nevinson’s “Harvest of Battle,” painted just after the war ended in 1919,
shows realistic British and German soldiers rising from the dead on a scarred
battlefield and walking off together. In both paintings, the dead (and resurrecting)
soldiers are part of the landscape, which is shown to be completely devastated.
This bizarre realism was also the preferred form of the German soldier-artist
Otto Dix, although Dix’s paintings, such as “The Flare” of 1917, convey raw and
powerful emotions, whereas Nevinson’s approach was more distant and ironic. Dix’s
wartime paintings, and postwar representations, are very much in the style of the
expressionists, a form of art that is particularly associated with Germany and
Scandinavia. The expressionists typically used bizarre realism in the depiction of
subjective feelings, often feelings of dread and loneliness. Dix’s approach is shared
partly with Max Beckmann, another German soldier who painted and made
engravings in the expressionist style. In the early years of the war he created a
realistic yet tortured self-portrait while also depicting the dead and wounded bodies
that he observed while working as a nurse. Many of his paintings use religious themes
to highlight war’s cruelty. One of his most famous paintings, “Resurrection” of 1918,
shows realistic, ordinary people in the foreground of an imaginary, devastated
landscape while, in the background, an apocalypse is lifting tortured bodies to the
sky. The expressionists captured the war’s cruelty and the defiled landscape with
their bizarre realism.
[2]
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
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Many of the artistic and literary representations of the war that are already cited
in this book reflect that view, but probably the most important work in shaping the
memory of the war has been All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on the
personal experiences of the author, Erich Maria Remarque, as a German soldier in
France. In the novel, a group of German soldiers endures the terrors of industrialized
warfare on the front, hiding in a dugout during a bombardment. The shelling presses
them to the limits of psychological endurance:
We sit as if in our graves waiting only to be closed in. Suddenly it howls and
flashes terrifically, the dug-out cracks in all its joints under a direct hit, fortunately
only a light one that the concrete blocks are able to withstand. It rings
metallically, the walls reel, rifles, helmets, earth, mud, and dust fly everywhere.
Sulphur flames pour in. If we were in one of those light dug-outs they have been
building lately instead of this deeper one, none of us would be alive. But the
effect is bad enough even so. The recruit starts to rave again and two others
follow suit. One jumps up and rushes out, we have trouble with the other two. I
start after one who escapes and wonder whether to shoot him in the leg— then it
shrieks again, I fling myself down and when I stand up the wall of the trench is
plastered with smoking splinters, lumps of flesh, and bits of uniform. I scramble
back.
[3]
On the battlefield, going under the ground provides shelter, even though that
leads to some soldiers coming down with claustrophobia. The landscape above, in
the trenches and in no-man’s-land, is filled with danger, and is described as such
throughout the novel. Only the earth can save them, an earth that is described in
mystical terms.
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the
earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he
presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and
his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only
friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and
her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run,
ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever. Earth!—Earth!—Earth!
Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself
and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the
bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting
surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the
storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones,
bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite
into thee with our lips!
[4]
In All Quiet on the Western Front, the natural world is seen as sustaining, even in
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
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combat, while industrialized warfare is terrifying. The novel is remembered mainly for
its critique of nationalism and for showing that the war was senseless. In that critique,
Remarque deploys natural metaphors. In one scene, the soldiers are discussing the
war’s origins. One soldier wonders how the war got started:
“Mostly by one country badly offending another,” answers Albert with a slight air
of superiority.
Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. “A country? I don’t follow. A mountain in
Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of
wheat.”
[5]
But in many ways the war transformed the participants’ views of nature. As the
literary critic Paul Fussell points out, poet-soldiers later in the war had even come to
view the sunrise itself as hostile, an inversion of the traditionally welcome view of the
sunrise that derived, in the First World War, from the anticipation of attacks at dawn,
when soldiers waited, ready, in the posture of “stand-to.” One famous example of an
ominous sunrise comes from Wilfred Owen’s poem “Exposure”:
The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . .
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens.
[6]
Owen’s and Remarque’s works were strongly critical of war, but others reached
different conclusions. The English composer Edward Elgar’s best wartime work, a
song cycle for choir and soloists entitled The Spirit of England, is set to poems by
Laurence Binyon. One of the stanzas became quite famous and is linked in the minds
of many people with Elgar’s musical setting:
They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We shall remember them.
Here Elgar and Binyon make a clear association between the soldiers and the
natural spectacle of the rising and setting of the sun. These were particularly poignant
for the British soldiers who associated dawn with attacks and who, stuck in trenches
for weeks and deprived of natural scenery, became keen observers of the sky. As
successful as this piece became, even Elgar had regrets about it. Before the war, his
music had been appreciated by many people in Germany. He hesitated about aspects
of the poetry that were propagandistic, while soldiers who listened to it believed that
the piece was too sentimental.
[7]
Oversentimentality affected the works of numerous wartime composers. It is
possible that the process of musical composition was hindered by ambivalence about
nationalism. Classically trained musicians typically traveled and studied internationally.
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
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The violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler fought in the Austrian army. In 1915, he
wrote in a letter that “my devotion to my own land is well known. I have many friends
in France, Belgium, England, and Russia. How could I change my feeling towards
them? How could any personal enmity enter in? To bridge over the abysses of hatred
that this war will leave behind it—that must be the mission of the artist.”
[8] One of the
only composers to respond to the war successfully, Maurice Ravel, was one of the
few to embrace patriotism—at the start of the war he enlisted in the French army at
the age of thirty-nine. One of his best choral compositions, “Three Birds of Paradise,”
is a tasteful and plaintive song in which three different birds, colored in the red, white,
and blue of France, fly over people at home who are missing their loved ones
because they have gone to war. The birds traditionally represent hope. The song’s
focus is on the natural world of sky and birds, while the people on the ground struggle
to interpret the absence of their loved ones, all without sentimentality or bellicosity.
Ravel was fascinated by the natural world and also by modern technology,
particularly airplanes. The concluding sixth section of his work for piano, The Tomb of
Couperin, is not only dedicated to a heroic French officer, but it is a thumping,
rhythmic depiction of an aircraft engine. Ravel describes an important technology in
one of his most famous virtuoso pieces, while refraining from any sentimentality that
could be associated with the war.
[9]
The war’s impact inspired many works of music, art, and fiction. There are also
powerful depictions in personal memoirs. In one of the most martial memoirs to come
out of the war, Storm of Steel, the German veteran Ernst Junger described how
soldiers survived a shelling.
You cower in a heap alone in a hole and feel yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst
for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities,
your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become meaningless and absurd.
While you think of it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing
may have started on its course. . . . You know that not even a cock will crow
when you are hit. Well, why don’t you jump up and rush into the night till you
collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on
there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see
you. Yet some one watches you. Unknown perhaps to yourself, there is some
one within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells:
Duty and Honour. . . . You clench your teeth and stay.
[10]
For Junger, the war tested human nature and confirmed its strength. After
describing the shelling for several paragraphs, he concludes that “human nature is
indeed indestructible.” This may be true, but the First World War helped to change
humanity’s view of nature and the material world. Veterans remembered a landscape
that had become ominous, even surreal, while prewar visions of technological
progress were complicated by the experience of mass, industrialized killing.
1. Richard P. Tucker, “The World Wars and the Globalization of Timber Cutting,” in
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
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Natural Enemy, Natural Ally, ed. Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell (Corvallis:
Oregon State University Press, 2004).
2. The works of art described here may be easily found in art history textbooks and
on Internet sites. An Internet site that contains many of the works of art discussed
here is “Art of the First World War: 100 Paintings from International Collections to
Commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the End of the First World War,”
http://www.memorial-caen.fr/10EVENT/EXPO1418/gb/visite.html.
3. Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (New
York: Fawcett, 1958), 110–11.
4. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 55–56.
5. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 204.
6. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 62.
7. Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 54–55.
8. Watkins, Proof through the Night, 357.
9. Watkins, Proof through the Night, 172–80.
10. James Hannah, ed., The Great War Reader (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 2000), 296.
Storey, William Kelleher. The First World War : A Concise Global History, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vt/detail.action?docID=1699237.
Created from vt on 2020-10-26 08:01:22. Copyright © 2014. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.

https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cY6TrasXF8

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14….

https://net.lib.byu.edu/~rdh7/wwi/versa/versa7.htm…

Storey: Chapter 16,17