1914 and Innocence

The British Expeditionary Force Arriving,  August 1914

Shaun O'Connell

For Henry James, writing in August 1914, The Great War represented “the plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness . . . that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, . . . making it too tragic for words.”  But not, as it turned out, beyond the reach of language, for James’s eloquent epiphany anticipates the floodtide of words poured out to describe and account for modern warfare. For war, whatever else it may be, is a painful process of initiation and enlightenment, a motivation for reflection and an inspiration for journalism, memoirs, fiction, and poetry. Indeed, the tragic may only be contained, fully imagined, in language.

“Never such innocence,” wrote Philip Larkin of the British who went off to war in “MCMXIV”:

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word—the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

But innocence among the young men who fight wars and the citizenry who applaud them as they march “over there,” while qualified by the record of previous wars, is, it seems, infinitely renewable, so the terrible facts and lessons of warfare require constant retelling. War, as H. G. Wells wrote, “is just the killing of things and the smashing of things,” but “when it is all over, then literature and civilization will have to begin again.”

The literature of warfare of the last century, particularly war memoirs, then, stands as an eloquent claim to civilization under siege and threatened by destruction; such literature is testimony to the transformation, for soldiers and civilians, affected by unimaginable experience, from innocence to awareness.

From: "Wars Remembered (2003)", New England Journal of Public Policy, 18 November 2015