My fascination with World War I began when I read The Great War and Modern Memory. Interweaving poetry, novels, historical facts, stories, myths, and anecdotes, this well-illustrated book showed me how to approach, if not understand, this complex and often tragic war.
My copy of the book records that I bought it in Radford, Virginia, in 1998, during the second of my two one-year positions as a visiting instructor, just before landing a tenure-track job. Its impact was immediate, because by the time I interviewed for jobs at the American Historical Association’s annual meeting in January 1999, I was telling interview committees that I wanted to teach a course on World War I. It took me a few years to be able to do so, and happily when I did, it was a co-taught course for undergraduate and graduate students called “World War I in British History and Culture.” My former colleague at Wright State University, Barry Milligan, an English literature professor, and I taught the course together several times. The most memorable experience was teaching it in London and on the Western Front as a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar for secondary school teachers. On the course, the participants could see every day how the memory of World War I marked the landscape, whether it was a memorial in a London Tube station or a preserved trench at a Somme battlefield. Every time Barry Milligan and I taught the course, we assigned either all of, or chapters from, The Great War and Modern Memory. This was an extraordinarily useful way to introduce students at every level, including experienced high school teachers, to the meaning and legacy of this war for the British soldiers who fought in it, for later British generations, and for the Anglophone world.
There is much to appreciate in The Great War and Modern Memory: Fussell’s clear, engaging prose; the multiple examples that support his argument; his deft use of personal stories; his seamless interweaving of different sources. The argument is powerful because it is grounded in the historical facts of the war, including the conduct and outcomes of major battles, casualty numbers, and detailed descriptions of the wartime conditions and geography, and it is informed by Fussell’s own World War II service. While the book’s argument has generated intense criticism from other scholars, including Jay Winter and Gordon Corrigan, three of the central and often overlapping points still resonate: the war as ironic, the war as a turning point, and the youthfulness of the soldiers.
Go to any World War I cemetery on the Western Front – large and more often small outposts of Britain – and be struck by the short time span between the birth and death dates on almost every gravestone. And then contemplate whether the gravestones align with the bodies underneath, bodies that might have been hastily buried in a mass grave and given the semblance of orderly, individual burial spots only when the gravestones were erected. Or go to the towering monuments like the one at Thiepval to see with sorrow the rows and rows of names and dates commemorating those whose bodies were never found. Or visit specifically Wilfred Owen’s (1893-1918) gravestone in the British cemetery at the edge of the French cemetery – with its elaborate tombs and tombstones and emotional tributes to the dead that present a vivid contrast to the stark, restrained simplicity of the British cemetery – in Ors to contemplate the twin ironies of his life and death. The war made him a great poet, and after his death, his mother tried to make him into a devout Christian by eliminating the question mark in the couplet she selected from his poem “The End” so that it reads as an affirmative sentence: “Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth / All death will he annul, all tears assuage.” And then think of the sad irony that his parents received the telegram announcing his death just as the bells in Shrewsbury were tolling for the armistice. Some have argued that irony was not as dominant a characteristic of the war for most who experienced it: but it certainly was for many of those, like Robert Graves and Vera Brittain (who is, shockingly, barely mentioned in The Great War and Modern Memory), whose memoirs shaped our understanding of the war, as well as for artists like Paul Nash, whose bleak wartime landscapes are coupled with ironically optimistic titles, like “We are making a new world” (1918).
Sometimes the specifics of the argument that the war was a turning point might not be entirely convincing, as when Fussell declares portentously, “Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it” (63). We might also wonder if it is accurate to say that “What we can call gross dichotomizing is a persisting imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War” (75). However, at other times the argument is validated by the now-unremarkable words and phrases that were once signs of the war as a turning point in our language. It’s doubtful than many people think of British troops in France when they purchase souvenirs on vacation or that tennis players think of trenches and barbed wire when they try to stay out of “no man’s land” on the court. Even if some of the specifics seem implausible in 2026, the general notion of World War I as a turning point still holds. World War I introduced mechanized warfare, chemical warfare, the airplane in war, total war, and the reliance on women in the workforce – all factors (another word whose widespread usage Fussell traces to World War I) – that remain today. Equally significantly, this is the war that set up some of the later cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, specifically the rise of fascism, World War II, and the Cold War – events linked to each other but also to the Great War.
The Great War and Modern Memory is not the last word on World War I. Its focus is Britain, not even the empire, and largely a certain class of Britons, although Fussell does try to look beyond the educated elite. However, for me and for others, scholars and non-scholars alike, it is the first word on World War I: our introduction, our lens, our motivation to learn more. That is indeed an impressive legacy.
Carol Engelhardt Herringer is a professor of history at Georgia Southern University. She is the author of Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and gender in England, 1830–85 (Manchester University Press, 2014).
