Today
is Armistice Day. Ninety-six years ago, Germany surrendered and brought World
War I to an end. The wreckage left behind by the war was enormous. More than 16
million people died, seven million of them civilians. Monarchies had ended in
Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The maps of Europe and
the Middle East were redrawn. New nations were formed. Lenin and the Communist
Party had taken control in Russia, except the control was tenuous, only to be
decided by an ugly civil war. Massive war reparations were imposed on Germany,
which would ultimately contribute to ruinous hyperinflation. Victorious Britain
and France faced huge war debts.
The
emotional and psychological impact on victor and defeated was just as
significant. That emotion and psychology had begun during the war, and it no
better articulated than by the group of Britons collectively known as the War
Poets.
We’ve
spent the last several weeks discussing the poets and poetry of World War I.
What we have not considered ion detail in the context of the poets and what
they wrote – and that context is the war itself, the Great War, the War to End
All Wars.
In
Some
Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, historian, novelist
and biographer Max Egremont (he’s also written a
biography of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon) does something unusual in a book.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Photograph: Chateau Wood, World War I.
1 comment:
My mother was in first grade when they announced that the war was over. It left a lasting impression on her even at that young age.
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