1914: The Unspoken Assumptions

By Henry G. Gole
From: "The Great War: A Literary Perspective,"  Parameters, 1987

How does one begin to explain the festive reception to war described in virtually all the literature of the time? Certainly part of the answer lies in the fact that the war experienced was not the war expected. War is always filled with surprises, but the sharp contrast between the euphoria of August and the later fatalism of front soldiers invites analysis.

In Redemption By War (1982), Roland N. Stromberg describes the alienation of the artist and the intellectual in the decades before 1914, an alienation caused by the widespread neglect of things of the mind that seemed to accompany mass production, industrialization, and social fragmentation. It seemed to creative and sensitive people that technological progress was bought at the price of some inner core of values whose loss was lamented. The philistinism meant, for example, that Germany's search for a place in the sun would turn the land of thinkers and poets away from philosophy, art, and religion. Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1900) reflects this concern, and Hermann Hesse's Un term Rad (Under the Wheel, 1906) suggests that the new age crushed sensitive souls as boors prospered. Franz Kafka's protagonists confront faceless bigness that denies individuality; Max Weber's sociology characterizes impersonal bureaucratic behavior that regards people as parts of a big machine. The artist and the intellectual reacted to soulless modernism by turning inward, thus demonstrating estrangement from the external world and a tendency to make art or energy or revolution ends in themselves. The literature in the years before the war abounds with phrases suggesting the disconnectedness of a beautiful "inner life" with ugly external life. D. H. Lawrence summed up the mood in 1912—"The last years have been years of demolition." Stromberg's thesis is that alienated intellectuals were ready for the drastic "redemption by war." 

James Joll, the distinguished British historian, offers yet another partial explanation for the ease with which Europe tripped or slipped into war in his 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions (1968). Joll contends that there are unspoken assumptions abroad in any age, assumptions that the historian must discover and bear in mind as he attempts to understand specific events. They are not to be found in archives. All of us are naturally affected by the spirit of the age, especially in our formative years, in ways as automatic as taking a breath. Joll suggests that World War I leadership was probably less influenced by the intellectual currents of 1900 to 1914 than by Darwin and Nietzsche. Perhaps, he speculates, the idea of social Darwinism influenced men in a way that predisposed them to a trial of strength. States, statesmen, soldiers, and certain unspoken assumptions were at work. That these things mattered is probable, but precisely how much they mattered is at best an educated estimate.

Joll joins Stromberg in noting how Europe seemed to welcome the escape from the dull and ordinary of everyday life and the plunge into a great adventure, an experience expected to elevate and purify a generation of Europeans. Something great and wonderful was expected. Further, involvement in war allowed societies temporarily to evade disruptive domestic issues. National values thrust aside class values. Of course, class tensions would return as the war ceased to be a great adventure and took on the character of a grinding man-killer promising no profit and deserving an end.

In Germany the ruling Social Democrats experienced schism and defection; in France the mutinies of 1917 were widespread and not unrelated to class feelings; in Britain strikes broke out on the home front during the war; in Russia two revolutions took place; in Italy defeatism reigned. But as war broke out the tensions were shelved. The unspoken assumption was that Europe would be better for the war.