In Good Will Hunting, there is a scene where Matt Damon’s character, Will, verbally spars with a Harvard graduate over U.S. history at a bar. Will predicts the other man’s every comment and mocks him for relying on the opinions of various scholars rather than having his own. Then he says, “You wanna read a real history book? Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book’ll knock you on your ass.” The Great War and Modern Memory is that book for people who are passionate about World War One—it has the potential to knock you out of your seat.
There are not many works of cultural criticism from the 1970s that readers still passionately recommend to each other, but The Great War and Modern Memory is one. For academics especially, Fussell’s words are captivating. He wasn’t the first to notice that the Great War was very literary or the first to focus primarily on the experience of British junior officers, but he was the best to do it. He managed to weave together details about things like men’s rations, the miles of trenches, and distances with literary analysis and excerpts of soldiers’ writing that wake you up. He brings forth all the ways in which the war was romantically framed and all the ways in which it failed to be romantic. His compassion for his subjects—grounded in his own war experience—made his portrayal of the horror of the trenches, the youth and nobility of the combatants, and the beauty of the war’s poetry incredibly moving.
For many historians, reading The Great War and Modern Memory was a professional turning point. Though the book is technically a work of literary criticism, Fussell’s excellent writing and facility with sources have now influenced generations of historians. Some historians even discovered their passion for the Great War by reading the book. If many historians go through an ancient Egypt phase as children, many also go through a Fussell phase in their twenties. Even Great War historians who are critical of the book are likely to keep a copy around.
All these years later, The Great War and Modern Memory casts a long shadow over the cultural history of the war. Though historians recognize the book’s imperfections and the weaknesses of some of Fussell’s arguments, the book remains a foundational text for anyone who wants to study the war. That means that things outside the book can be almost invisible or seem unimportant. From The Great War and Modern Memory, you would never know that women had any war experiences or wrote any significant war memoirs. You would know very little about the enlisted experience of the war. You might find it hard to believe that not all veterans were equally embittered and ironic. Some of the obscuration is in Fussell’s arguments and some simply accompanies the success of the book, which still plays a role in shaping the narrative of the war for many scholars.
I can offer a good example of the book shaping perceptions. This semester, a student told me that her sister is in graduate school, studying World War II poetry. Instinctively, I corrected her. “Poetry? No, that’s World War I. That was the literary war.” For a moment, I could not imagine anyone studying the poetry of any other war. By illuminating the literature of the Great War so well, Fussell’s work had obscured other things in my mind.
In a sense, Fussell’s work now sometimes plays the role of the literature read by the subjects of his book. Men like Graves and Sassoon and Owen saw and interpreted the war through the lens of their reading. They responded to the war with the language and metaphors they had on hand. For some of us—even when we know the book’s failings—we cannot help but see the war partly through the lens of The Great War and Modern Memory. For decades now, works that examine life in the trenches have nodded at Fussell’s depiction of the “troglodyte world.” A conversation about the relationship between war and pastoralism seemingly must include Fussell. Even though it is not the final word, the significance of The Great War and Modern Memory makes it the starting point for many historians of the Great War.
Both the book and its influence demonstrate the importance of literature and the significance of inherited narratives. The war writers had resources in the narratives and imagery that they inherited from the books they read and the stories they were raised on. As insufficient as those resources were for the war they encountered, they helped. And Fussell himself was writing The Great War and Modern Memory during Vietnam. The words of the First World War’s literary soldier boys were by then resources available to later generations trying to make sense of their own futile war and wasted youth. Fussell argues that modern war exceeded the abilities of the literary resources available in the Great War, but his work also demonstrates that while literature will not save your life, it may sustain you at times.
Lastly, Fussell’s own writing is very powerful. In part, because of his compassion for the men he studied and, in part, because of his ambition for the book. He wanted to say something. He wanted readers to feel something. He did not come to this project with a little ambition and a tenure application. In an afterword from 2000, Fussell writes:
For three months I lived in the trenches with the British soldiery, accompanying them on raids on the German trenches across the way, consoling myself with their rum, pursuing and crunching lice in my trouser seams, and affecting British phlegm as they jumped the bags and dashed directly into machine-gun fire. How did they stand it? What did they think about? In 1975, my American readers had also experienced in Vietnam their own terrible and apparently pointless war of attrition, which made body counts a household phrase. In writing this book I hoped to suggest to them some of the psychological and intellectual dimensions of “combat”—to use the current euphemism. I hoped that the effect of the book on such readers might persuade them that even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.
Fussell brought all this to the page. This, too, is why The Great War and Modern Memory persists. It was and is an authentic attempt at comprehension and a work of effortful, if imperfect, engagement. And that’s why it’s a book that can still knock you out of your seat.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She is also the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
