Stranger Than We Can Imagine (9 page)

The initial shooting that led to the conflict was itself a farce. The assassin in question was a Yugoslav nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He had given up in his attempt to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria following a failed grenade attack by Princip’s colleague, and gone to a café. It is often said that he got himself a sandwich, which would surely have been the most significant sandwich in history, but it seems more likely that he was standing outside the café without any lunch. By sheer coincidence the Archduke’s driver made a wrong turn into the same street and stalled the car in front of him. This gave a surprised Princip the opportunity to shoot Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg. Over 37 million people died in the fallout from that assassination.

Europe plunged the world into a second global conflict a generation later. The Second World War produced art and literature that were resolute, determined and positive, from songs like ‘We’ll Meet Again’ to movies like
The Dam Busters
or
Saving Private Ryan
. They highlight a clear, unarguable sense of purpose, based around the central understanding that fascism had to be stopped whatever the cost. The First World War, in contrast, produced novels such as
All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque or the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, all of which examined the war from a point of shocked, uncomprehending horror. The soldiers of the First World War had no comparisons in history to turn to for an explanation of what they had experienced. Remarque fought on the opposing side to Sassoon and Owen, but the questions that these soldiers wrestled with were the same. The experience of the war seems universal, regardless of which side of the trenches a soldier was on and regardless of whether it was recounted by an upper-class poet like Sassoon or a working-class war poet like Ivor Gurney. Much of the most important work did not appear until decades after the conflict, as people were still trying to make sense of their experience of war long after it ended.

This difference in tone is highlighted by two classic war movies, which both tell a broadly similar story of captured officers attempting to escape from a prisoner of war camp. The names of these two films are enough to express their differing character. John Sturges’s 1967 film about Second World War Allied prisoners is called
The Great Escape
. Jean Renoir’s 1937 story of French First World War prisoners is called
La Grande Illusion
.

With the exception of airmen such as the Red Baron, who won eighty dogfights up in the clouds far removed from life in the mud and trenches, the First World War did not generate popular, romanticised stories. It is instead remembered with static visual symbols – poppies, muddy fields, silhouetted soldiers, trenches, graves – rather than narrative. The closest it came were the spontaneous, unofficial Christmas truces that saw men from both sides leave the trenches, fraternise and play football together. What marked this incident as memorable was that it was not war itself, it was the opposite of war. This ceasefire has become the popular folk memory of the Great War, for who could romanticise the events of Gallipoli, Passchendaele or the Somme? The pointlessness of the conflict can be seen in the stoical humour of the soldiers, who would march to the trenches singing, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here …’

Remarque, Sassoon and other writer-soldiers, and writer-nurses like Vera Brittain, did not don their uniforms to profit themselves. They did so because their king, kaiser or emperor told them to. Most were patriotic and loyal, and enlisted on the back of a wave of enormous popular support for the conflict. As the war dragged on past Christmas 1914 the belief that what they were doing was worthwhile began to falter. By 1917, it was gone. Although early war poems did deal with the expected notions of honour and glory, such as Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ (‘If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England’), those poet-soldiers abandoned that approach when the reality of the war became apparent. Assuming that, unlike Brooke who died in 1915 on his way to Gallipoli, they lived long enough.

*

Why was the reality of the First World War so different to initial expectations? Why was it not over by Christmas, in line with most contemporary assumptions about the nature of conflict? The answer, in part, is technology. It was the first industrialised war.

Before the twentieth century, technology was understood as progress. There had been some protests about the impact of new inventions, most notably by the early nineteenth-century Luddites who destroyed industrial machinery to protest at the effect machines were having on traditional industries. More usually technological advance was believed to be a positive force, providing economic growth and proving mankind’s mastery over the natural world. Technology increased what we were capable of. Steam engines allowed us to move great weights, motorcars and bicycles allowed us to travel faster, and telescopes or microscopes allowed us to see what our eyes alone could not. Technology was a tool that provided power or precision, and it did our bidding. But around the beginning of the twentieth century technology started to shrug off our control. Disasters like the sinking of RMS
Titanic
on her maiden voyage, or the uncontrollable fire that consumed the German passenger zeppelin the Hindenburg, showed the downside of progress. Technology could now produce human disasters which were just as terrifying as natural ones. The pseudo-science of eugenics, which aimed to ‘improve’ the quality of the human race by favouring certain genetic traits, revealed that progress cared little for human emotions like empathy or concern for others.

Professional soldiers in the First World War went to the front trained in the traditional military skills of horse riding and swordplay, but cavalry was soon replaced by tanks, poison gas and machine guns. Career soldiers were soon outnumbered by conscripts and volunteers. Soldiers were not galloping heroically over the fields towards their enemy, but hiding in sodden trenches which did not move for months or even years, along with rats and a terrible lack of food and supplies. And then there was the shelling.

The troops lived under bombardments which could go on for
hours or days or weeks, from the ear-splitting booms of close shelling to the low, bass grumbles of far distant explosions. Each shell arrived unannounced, as if from nowhere. The next shell always had the potential of being a direct hit. Bodies and body parts were lost among the mud and craters, only to resurface again after a later bomb fell. One legacy of shelling was the many Tombs of Unknown Soldiers around the world. These tombs were built after the war, containing anonymous bones which symbolised all lost soldiers. Grieving families paid their respects to remains that could be anyone, such was the ability of this conflict to dehumanise war.

The word ‘shellshock’ was coined to describe the psychological breakdowns caused by this trauma. This was poorly understood at the time, with some dismissing it as cowardice or ‘low moral fibre’. We have since become familiar with the phenomenon, whose symptoms range from near-catatonia to panicked flight, and call it ‘combat stress reaction’. Put simply, technology had made warfare psychologically too terrible for soldiers to bear. It took just a few short years for the jubilation of the recruiting stations to become a determination that global conflicts such as this could never be allowed to happen again. This point was hammered home by the name that the conflict soon became known by: the War to End All Wars. When people dared to imagine that such an ingrained constant of history as war would never occur again, then we had clearly entered a new phase in the psyche of mankind.

It was scale that both created and ended the imperial world. Empires were born when population growth caused egalitarian structures to break down. They ended when technology had grown to the point where warfare could no longer be tolerated. The imperial system, it turned out, was not the unarguable, unavoidable system of human organisation that it had been believed to be for most of history. It was a system that only functioned during a certain period of human and technological growth.

If warfare was no longer acceptable in the industrialised world then emperors, tsars and kaisers could no longer be trusted with the power they held. They had stupidly led the world into horror once,
and could do so again. The concept of emperors, one of the great constants in human history, was finished. It is impossible to imagine that a modern-day Emperor Norton would receive free food, clothes and travel if they claimed that title after the First World War.

The traditional method of regicide was not hanging or burning, but beheading. If you intended to kill a king it was necessary to chop off his head, as Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France unhappily discovered. This was highly symbolic. It was not just their actual head you were hacking off, but the head of the political hierarchy. An absolute monarch was the omphalos around which the rest of society orientated itself. Squabbles with ministers aside, law and sometimes religion were whatever that emperor decreed them to be. You might not have liked what an emperor did, but you understood that power was theirs. You knew what your role in the hierarchy was, and you orientated yourself accordingly. Without the omphalos of emperors, society was a jumble of different, relative, individual perspectives, all fighting for credibility and political power.

This is what was so remarkable about the changes that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. The sudden departure of emperors across huge swathes of the planet was the removal of single, absolute, fixed perspectives. This is a story we’ve already seen played out in different arenas. Art, physics and geopolitical structures all underwent similar revolutions around the same time, for seemingly unconnected reasons. Politicians were wrestling with the same challenges that faced Einstein, Picasso, Schoenberg and Joyce: how can we proceed, now that we understand there is no ultimate perspective that every other viewpoint is subservient to? How do we reconcile contradictory positions? When our previous ways of thinking are fundamentally flawed, how do we move forward?

These developments would have no doubt pleased an anarchist like Martial Bourdin, who blew himself up by the Greenwich Observatory, had he lived to see them. But at the time when empires were falling, few people thought that the politics of anarchism were a plausible way to organise society. The immediate requirement
was stability. Deleting an omphalos leaves you with the chaotic noise of multiple perspectives. Managing this requires a system like democracy.

Limited forms of democracy had been growing for centuries but the vote had been typically limited to elite members of society, such as landowners. Now the long campaigns for universal suffrage, the right for every adult citizen to vote regardless of education, gender or wealth, were about to bear fruit. Universal suffrage appeared in much of Europe, including Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Poland and the Netherlands, in 1918 or 1919. In the United States the date was 1920, although some ex-Confederate states introduced racial exceptions that were later deemed unconstitutional. Female suffrage often took longer than male, for example in the United Kingdom which gave all adult males the vote in 1918 while women waited until 1928. In countries such as France, Argentina and Japan women had to wait until the end of the Second World War. But for those countries that did not take the communist route out of the failing imperial world, the trend was clear.

Power could not be entrusted to absolute rulers in a world capable of industrialised warfare. The multiple perspective of democracy was safer than the single vision of an emperor. With those emperors gone, political power was redistributed into the hands of individuals.

Aleister Crowley
(second from left)
with companions on an expedition, 1902
(Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty)

FOUR:
INDIVIDUALISM

I
n April 1904 the British poet, mountaineer and occultist Aleister Crowley dictated a book which, he believed, was transmitted to him by a non-human intelligence called Aiwass. Aiwass was his Holy Guardian Angel, ‘a Being of intelligence and power immensely subtler and greater than aught we can call human’.

Accounts of people who claim to receive information from spirits, angels, strange beings or other non-human sources are common throughout history, and the early twentieth century was no different. In 1913 the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung saw visions and heard voices of a being called Philemon. Philemon appeared as an old man with bull’s horns and kingfisher’s wings, and engaged Jung in deep discussion about the nature of the mind. In 1925 the Irish poet W.B. Yeats and his wife Georgie used automatic writing to contact spirits, who would announce they were ready to communicate by filling Yeats’s house with the scent of mint.