The Great War

As we conclude our discussion of The Great War, it is important that we try to understand how its psychological effects on all of Europe (accompanied the ten million deaths) helped create the conditions that brought on WWII. Clearly, a study of WWII and the rise of the Fascist governments in Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan cannot begin until we understand why these events were the outcome of the First and most likely its continuation.

In his book, The First World War(1998) British historian John Keegan writes,

Above all, the war imposed on the civilian populations involved almost none of the deliberate disruptions and atrocity that was to be the feature of the Second. The First, unlike the Second World War, saw no systematic displacement of the populations, no deliberate starvation, no expropriation, little massacre or atrocity. It was, despite the efforts by state propaganda machines to prove otherwise, and the cruelties of battlefield apart, a curiously civilised war.

Yet it damaged civilisation, the rational and liberal civilisation of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage was done, world civilisation also. Pre-War Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles. They were lost altogether in Russia after 1917, in Italy after 1922, in Germany in 1933, in Spain in 1936. Within fifteen years of the war's end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the collapse of monarchy in 1789, was almost everywhere on the rise. Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means....Less than twenty years after the end of the Great War... Europe was once again gripped by the fear of a new war, provoked by the actions and ambitions of war lords more aggressive than any known to the old world of the long nineteenth century peace.

Your assignment is this:


Deconstruct Keegan's excerpt with specific arguments/discussions using the poems of Sassoon and Owen (see below), the video excerpts (bel0w), and the assigned readings (including the Gopnik piece). Please do this in a 4-5 page paper making sure that you use notes/citations where appropriate. Paper is due February 23 by 11:59 pm.


Sigfried Sassoon

"Counter-Attack"

Wilfred Owen

"Dolce et Decorum Est"

"Anthem for Doomed Youth"

From The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century
(KCET/BBC co-production in association with The Imperial WarMuseum. 1996-2004)