Episode 4 - The Rite of Spring, Part 2

"Now all roads lead to France; And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead; Returning lightly dance"

Second of a 3-part series based on the book "Rites of Spring:  The Great War and the Birth of the  Modern Age" by Modris Ekstiens,  about the evolution of the modernist spirit in Western Europe.  This episode explores how the slaughter of WW1 and continued disruption after the war eroded the values of the Victorian age and hastened the adoption of aspects of modernism

To explore further:

• Photo of Adolph Hitler cheering start of WW1
• Exhibition of modernist war artists
• Book The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End

Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com

Photo credit:  Paul Nash, Menin Road 1918, Imperial War Museum

Transcript

Welcome! To the fourth episode in the series, “Talking Modernism”, the podcast about the 1920s and 30s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed the world. I am your host, Michael Hauptman. 

This is the second episode discussing about the spirit of modernism in Western Europe in the 1920s and 30s. It’s based on the book “Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”, by historian Modris Eksteins. I had hoped to make this the concluding episode, but I’m finding the book defies summary, so its urned into a 3-parter. Let’s continue from where we ended the last episode, with the outbreak of WW1. 

WW1, the death of “fair play”, and the triumph of the avant-garde

If the Victorian and Edwardian ages saw the triumph of the middle classes in Western Europe, the bourgeoisie, then World War 1 was its doom. 

The cost in manpower, the slaughter, was staggering and unprecedented in the western world. In the four years between 1914 and 1918, 29 million men fought on the Western Front. Of these 29 million, a full 3 and a half million, or one in 10 were killed, and a further 8.2 million, more than 1 in 4 were seriously wounded. For France, this represented 5%, one death in 20 across the entire population, for Germany 4% and Austro-Hungary 4%, and for Britain 3%.

But as well as being a ghastly destroyed of lives, the War also damaged, or at least severely tested, the bourgeois values of the preceding age, and in its place nurtured the impulse towards moderism. Indeed, in his book Ekstien’s calls WW1 the psychological turning point for Modernism as a whole. 

Take for instance the famous truce on the Western front in the Christmas of 1914, when soldiers of Britain, France and Germany spontaneously emerged fromf their trenches and joined in no-man’s land to share a meal, exchange photos and gifts, and forgo hostilities for the day. In December 1914, only 5 months into the war, the soldiers on both sides still retained the Victorian age values of “fair play” and “brotherhood of man” that allowed them to put aside the war for a day and fraternize. Interesting to note too that the truce mainly involved the British lines – the French, fighting for their home, had a slightly less disinterested view of the war, though there were widespread incidences of the truce on the French side. And on the German side it tended to occur in the Saxons and Bavarian regiments, that were less fanatical than the Prussian regiments. 

Extraordinary as the 1914 Christmas truce was, it is also interesting is that it was unique – similar widespread truces did not occur in 1915, 16 or 17. Sentiments had hardened, Victorian values of “fair play” did not seem relevant. In 1915 the Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, delivered a sermon with a markedly non-Christian message, that was typical of the time:

Everyone that loves freedom and honour … are banded in a great crusade – we cannot deny it – to kill Germans; to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank the Lusitania, and who turned the machine-guns on the civilians of Aerschott and Louvain – and to kill them lest the civilisation of the world itself be killed.

Europe had sought to limit the excesses of war with the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. In their quest for victory on the battlefield however and coloured perhaps by their framing of ethics in neo-Kantian terms, the Germans leveraged the full potential of modern science and technology to expand their arsenal, even if they outraged the sensibilities of the earlier age and contravened the Hague conventions. The Germans pioneered the use of flamethrowers, poison gas, and unrestricted submarine warfare. And the allied nations, even if they decried these German innovations, invariably followed Germany’s lead. Modernism innovation triumphed over Victorian sensibilities. Indeed at a reunion of a British chemical warfare unit ten years after the War, there was a skit, that twinned Diaghilev’s modern balley The Rite of Spring with the modern innovation of chemical warfare. The skit was described in the program thus:

Raperski presents his famous Russian Ballet “Dialysis”. The scene is laid in a woodland glade in which the three beautiful sisters Chlorine, Bromine and Iodine, are found wandering. Sodium, a notorious bad character, approaches and beguiles them by presenting each an electron for their rings. Too late they discover what has happened and they are about to crystallize out in despair, when they are precipitated by Argentum and are thus saved from their awful doom. The last scene depicts Sodium, who has now become an Ion, in Brownian motion.”

In a further outrage aginst convention, Germany sought to ferment rebellions amongst the allies by exporting revolutionaries. In 1916 they landed Roger Casement by submarine in Ireland to support the Easter Rebellion there, and in 1917 they sent Lenin to Russia to lead the revolution there. Again, we can see similar actions by the Allies in Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration in which they declared their support for a Jewish homeland in then Ottoman Palestine, whose purpose was at least partly to ferment insurrection amongst Jewish communities in the Ottoman empire. 

The Allies, like the bloodthirsty Brishop Of London, justified their actions on the grounds on the exingencies of wartime, that they were in a war to save Civilization, that the end would justify the means. 

Many nations on both sides of the conflict had official war artists schemes, where they sponsored artists to document the war, and from my quick search of the internet most of these tended to be conventional styles from the 19th century tradition. Indeed, an account of Australia’s war art scheme notes that:

The insistence on the documentary character of the art pushed the artists into a more academic/representational treatment, which not only played to their strengths but was also regarded as far more palatable than modernism to both veterans and the bereaved.

The vistas of the Western Front however were unlike any that had come before. As Eksteins writes in his book,

The whole landscape of the Western Front became surrealistic before the term surrealism was invented

He is referring here to landscapes of sodden blasted, battlefields, of soldiers in gas masks. Of the new machinery of war tanks, planes, howitzers and machine guns,. Of vast mass armies with serried ranks stretching to the horizon. None of this was really suited to the “academic/representational treatment “ of the proceeding age. 

Britain in particular employed several modernists as official war artists, notably Paul Nash and Christopher Nevison, and Canada employed Frederick Varley and A.Y. Jackson. I’ve included a link to a few of their works on the website.

Paul Nash’s 1918 watercolour Sunrise, Inverness Copse, for instance, shows dawn breaking over a blasted, churned battlefield. A series of blasted black stumps stretch from the pale dawn sky. An ambiguous long shape pokes from the brown mud, either a splintered tree-trunk or a skeletal forearm. Looking at the desolation depicted in this painting, and remembering the astronomical casualty rate, almost 1 in 10 killed, 1 in 4 seriously wounded, its hard to understand how exactly did the armies of the Western Front managed to sustain the struggle for 4 long years? Large portions of the French army, who suffered the highest casualty rate of the Western Front, did mutiny in 1917 after a particularly disastrous series of offensives. But by and large the vast majority of soldiers of both sides continued to fight and serve right to the end. 

Idealism was part of the answer, at least at the start of the war. All the European nations entered WW1 with a woefully misplaced enthusiasm. The Austro-Hungarians were avenging the death of their Crown Prince. The French saw an opportunity to correct the injustice of the 1870 Franco Prussian war and reclaim the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. Britain was fighting save ”plucky little Belgium”, and also to save from the barbaric Hun the Civilization that they had done so much to create. But it’s hard to imagine a population more in favour of a war than Germans at the start of WW1. The Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on 28th June. But war didn’t start overnight, first there was the “July Crisis”, a month of diplomatic manoeuvring, threats and ultimatums, before Germany declared war on Russia, France and Belgium on 1st August. And during the sunny days and balmy summer evenings of a notably pleasant July, the crisis in Germany played out to ever-growing crowds of citizens lamouring for war vociferously demanding an aggressive and victorious resolution to the crisis. In Berlin for instance, the broad avenue of the Unter der Linden saw large pro-war demonstrations every day from 25th July onwards. Diplomats at the foreign office had to push through crowds of pro-war demonstrators at Moltkestrassee to get to work. Similar scenes were repeated at towns throughout Germany. To the German people, there was a sense that was both inevitable, especially since the Agadir crisis, and welcome, a chance finally to break out of the encirclement, both physically and metaphorically, of the hypocritical, inefficient democracies to the west and the antiquated, semi-medieval Russian empire to the east. “Et jeht los!” - “It’s on!”, as the crowds of Berliner cried. The small voice of German opposition to the war – there were some small anti-war demonstrations organised by the Social Democrats on 28th July, were drowned by the ever-increasing public clamour for war. By 3rd August, the Social Democrats deputies had swung in support of the war and voted in favour of war credits. One of them said if they hadn’t, they would have been trampled to death in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

And the demonstrating crowds had no doubt that they would be victorious. In August 1914 Germany had a modern army of 3.8 million men, heir to a Prussian army that had defeated France in six months in 1870. But even the act of coming together as a nation to declare war, all barriers of race, class and political allegiances forgotten, all united and working together for a common goal, was a transformation of Germany, a victory of sorts in itself. Many Germans who lived through that timewould never forget the mood of those days in late July and August what they called the Augusterlebnis, or Spirit of August. The German historian Friedrich Meinecke (mynicki) said that he would experience a shiver when he thought about the mood of that August, and that, despite the disasters which followed, those days were perhaps the most sublime of his life. Writer after writer has shared similar sentiments. Incredibly, we have a photo of a young Adolf Hitler in a crowd in Munich’s Odeonsplatz cheering the announcement of war, his face ecstatic, radiant. He wrote of that time:

“To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by a mighty enthusiasm, I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time.”

As the sanguine hopes of early victory proved to be cruel illusions, it was continuing echoes of the Augusterlebnis though, the sense of a community united and working towards a common goal, that sustained Germany for the next 4 years. And indeed all the combatant nations in WW1 had their version of Augusterlebnis, of the community coming together for a common cause. As one commentator noted

One of the most beautiful things that the war brought is the fact that we no longer have a rabble

At the start of the war, mobilisation was uplifting: the mob disappeared and only the nation remained.

It was in the trenches that this sense of community and purpose was strongest. Conscript soldiers formed close bonds with their unit mates – the brotherhood of the trenches. After spending 3 weeks on the sort of hellish front line that Paul Nash depicted – soldiers on the Western Front rarely spent more than about 3 weeks at a time actually on the front line, it wasn’t humanly possible to bear much more than that – one British soldier wrote:

It would be a nightmare to any individual. But we create amongst ourselves a wonderful comradeship which I think would overcome any hardship

And as the war ground on for 4 bloody, dispiriting years, it was a sense of community and duty more than idealism that sustained the solider in the trenches. Ekstiens quotes a poem by a soldier, a volunteer rather than a conscript, written in 1917 that nicely captures this:

It must be so, it’s wrong to doubt

The Voluntary system’s best

Your conscript when you’ve dug him out

Has not the happy warrior’s zest

Because it seemed the thing to do

I joined with other volunteers

But well, I don’t mind telling you

I didn’t reckon for three years,

Though we observe the Higher Law,

And though we have our quarrel just,

Were I permitted to withdraw,

You would not see my arse for dust.

The Armistice, imperfect peace and the “Lost generation”

The War on the Western front may have ended on 11 November 1918, but the turmoil across much of Europe continued almost unabated. A series of political and economic crises engulfed Europe in the period between 1919 and 1925,. These, plus the realisation of the terrible human toll of the preceding 4 years, worked to continue the assault hat the War had starte on the bougouise optimistim, ideals and values of the 19th, century.

Coming in the shadow of WW1, its easy to overlook how severe and wide ranging were the upheaval in post-war Europe, and indeed world-wide. I don’t have time in the podcast to give more than a brief overview. But if you want to find out more I can recommend a book from 2016 called “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End’. I’ve provided a link in the podcast website. 

Let’s start with politics. The War had destroyed four empires: Germany, Russia, Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans. And a host of new countires had come into being: Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Czechsolvaia, Turkey, the Irish Republic, to name but a few. And war contunued to convulse Europe: in 1919 there were wars between Romania and Hungary, Poland and Russia, Greece and Turkey, Italy and Yugoslavia. Not to mention the Russian Civil War, which continued until 1921. 

As well as wars between states, there were civil insurrections in the years immediately after 1918, especially insurrections and revolts inspired by the Russian revolution. There was the Irish war of independence, as well as Communist-inspired uprisings in Germany, Hungary and Finland. Britain’s characterisation of WW1 as “the war to end all wars” was never a starter.

European finances between 1919 and 1925 were similarly tumultuous. Most economies faced a combination of high inflation and low growth. Some countries did enjoy a brief boom in the first couple of years after the war. But most faced low growth, as wartime manufacturing ceased and agriculture and domestic manufacture took a while to re-establish itself. And inflation was universally high with all governments except the US facing heavy wartime debts and surging peacetime demand, delayed somewhat by the Spanish Influenza pandemic. Inflation in Britian briefly peaked at 15% in 1920. In Britain it quickly died away but in many nations, especially new unproven countries like, Austria, Poland, Hungary and, most famously, Wiemar Germany it turned into hyperiflation. In Germany in 1922, a loaf of bread cost cost 160 marks. By the end of 1923 it cost 200 billion marks, and one US dollar cost 4.2 trillion marks. Hyperinflation was hugely disruptive to societies, but its effects were not felt evenly. People and companies who had debt, mortgages and real assets like property were less impacted. People who had savings, bond investments and pensions – and this included much of the middle class, the standard bearers of the Victorian age – were made destitute overnight. 

And of course the nations were faced with a realisation of the terrible human toll of the War. A full 3 and a half million killed. Each dead soldier indicated a shattered family: parents, wives, children, siblings all bereft. The scale of the loss led to an unprecedented commeroration and veneration of the war dead. The Victorian age had also venerated the dead, with extensive mourning rituals, but the commemoration of the dead of WW1 was on a different scale altogether. Prior to WW1, memorials to commemorate war dead were rare and small-scale. There were significant memorials to victory, but not to the dead. This all changed after WW1. France erected 176 thousand, Britain over 100 thousand, there were untold thousands in Italy, Germany and Austria. 

National days of mourning were declared, 4th November in Italy, 11 November in Britain, France and Belgium, in Germany the first Sunday in Advent. The dead were mourned, but they were also venerated as having made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. The Cenotaph in London, Britain’s main shrine of remembrance, is simply emblazoned “Our Glorious Dead”. In the minds of their grieving families; parents, wives, children, friends and comrades-in-arms, the dead would be forever young. In the words of Australia’s rememberance day poem:

They shall grow not 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 will remember them.

The glorious dead would remain forever young, a heroic sacrifice for all time. It was the living who would remain and grow old, bereft with grief, with wounds both physical and mental. As the British poet Edward Thomas wrote before his death in WW1 

Now all roads lead to France

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead

Returning lightly dance.

The glorification and characterisation of the multitudes of war dead as a heroic sacrifice had echoes of the primative, modernist sentiments of Stravinkski’s 1913 ballet. Their individual deaths were not heroic, the most that individual courage could typcially achieve in the face of machine guns, barbed wire, artillery and gas was to die stoically. But collectively, their death had gained a meaning: an ultimate sacrifice to save their fellow man. The Great War had become Western Europe’s Rite of Spring. Life had come to mimic art.

And what of the 25 million veterans who returned from the war? After all the horrors the witnessed, how did these young men integrate back into society? By-and-large and as a group, the soldiers that fought on the Western Front showed remarkable resilience after the war ended, and this was true of the victorious and vanquished nations alike. One quarter of veterans were seriously wounded, and I imagine most front-line soldiers would have been suffering some form of PTSD. Many did suffer breakdowns under the strain. But for all the countries that fought on the Western front, alcohol consumption, which you think might be an indicator of a society undergoing widespread psychological trauma, actually dropped significantly in the 4 years after the war compared to the 4 years prior in all nations except in Italy, and especially in France, where alcohol consumption, already the highest on average in the world, increased significantly. Similarly, the suicide rate in the four years after the war was no higher than the four years prior. And it had actually dropped significantly during the war. 

Another sign of the resilience of the veterans was how quickly Europe rebuilt and recovered after 1925. Much of the world enjoyed an economic boom in the latter half of the 1920s. In Germany, for instance, where the economy had shrunk by a third during the war, by 1929 the GDP per head was 13% higher than it had been on the eve of the war, stimulated by large loans from the US. The recovery story was similar in Belgium, France and Italy. Britain had a much slower economic recovery as the war had destroyed forever its leading position in international trade. It didn’t regain its pre-war GDP per capita until 1937, and unemployment remained high throughout the 1920s, even before the Great Depression.

But below this veneer of stoic recovery, post-War Western Europe had deep psychic wounds. As the years progressed the vast gulf between the lofty ideals of the war and its price, the huge blood sacrifice became more and more evident. Ernest Hemmingway, himself a veteran, in a 1926 novel telling names the veterans “the lost generation”. In France they were known as Le Génération du feu, the "(gun)fire generation", in Italy the Generazione Bruciata, the Burnt Generation. Interesting, the Germans called the generation who came of age after WW1 the lost generation, heir to a Germany reduced by the Treaty of Versailes ,. 

In 1929 the German author Erich Maria Remarque published the book “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Its hard to overstate the impact of its release. It was the phenonenon of post-war publication, the first runaway international bestseller. In its first year it sold a million copies in Gernany and 800k copies in England and the US, printing presses could not keep up with demand. Within a year it was translated into 20 languages and made into an Oscar-wnning Hollywood movie. All Quiet on the Western Front struck a chord with all nations of the Lost Generation because in its depiction of the WW1 soldier misled by bougouise authority in all its forms, from the schoolmaster to the drill seargent to the general staff. it captured the zeitgeist, the universal feeling which was one of a world betrayed by the old bougousie order.

On that note of bougouise disillusionment, let’s leave our podcast for now. Join me next time when I’ll conclude our stort by talking about how the modernist spirit of personal freedom developed through the Roarding 20s, before giving shape to Italian Facism and German Nazism, the political embodiment of a nihilistic Rite of Spring. I look forward to speaking with you then.