Veterans Day was originally called Armistice Day; it marked the end of what was known as the World War, when it was the only one, or the Great War.
The verdict is in: the Great War wasn’t worth it.
At least so you’d have to conclude from its treatment in popular culture. “Downton Abbey,” the popular series ongoing on PBS is typical in suggesting that the reality of that war consisted of equal parts squalor, horror and meaninglessness. An enthusiast is one who hasn’t been there, doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ( Likewise in such movies as “Birdsong,” “Legends of the Fall,” the PBS movie“My Boy Jack,” and others.)
A modern classic song of the season is John McCutcheon’s poignant “Christmas in the Trenches” in which combatants emerge from the trenches to play a holiday soccer game, making the war itself seem a tragically senseless backdrop.
Was World War One really meaningless? Whatever inspired it originally, the causes you can read about in a history book, whatever was accomplished by it as viewed at the time (it certainly did not turn out to be the war to end all wars or make the world noticeably safe for democracy), they have been eclipsed by the tragic maiming and slaughter of a significant portion of a generation of young men. The cure has, it would seem, been deemed much worse than the disease.
Will we ever come to look at World War Two the same way? At this point, it would seem from movies and TV, the meaning of WWII has considerably more staying power than that of the first war.
With the possible exception of the First Gulf War, which was over so quickly there was no time for the first flush of enthusiasm to get extinguished, none of our wars since WWII have measured up. The Korean War is known best by the ironic movie and TV series MASH in which the war’s meaning seems irrelevant. The war in Vietnam, the first exposed to journalistic scrutiny and TV coverage, was widely disapproved for years in polls and afterwards in movies such as “Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now.”
Iraq and Afghanistan have proved of such dubious virtue that it’s clear they could only be fought by a paid professional army. Recently there’s the scandal of the suicide rate. For every soldier killed in battle this past year, about 25 veterans died by their own hands. It’s hard not to read that as an indictment of an unpopular, nonsensical war.
As for World War Three, we’ve known from the start, even while flirting with it Cold War style, that it would not be worth it.
WWII seems the exception to this general decline of the reputation of war. But for how long? Paul Fussell, a Purple Heart veteran and scholar of the war in “Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War” suggests that the battlefield realities of even the Good War were such that they had to be consistently fudged by propaganda to get young men to contribute lives and limbs to it.
The defense of the Good War is still strong among us. “What would the world have been like if we hadn’t taken out Hitler and company, whatever the cost?” is still sufficient to head off any real discussion. But when no more members of the Greatest Generation are among us–the youngest vets are in their mid-to late 80s–will we come to view even that war differently?
Whatever you can imagine of a world according to Hitler has considerable competition in the price of victory itself: 70 million deaths, most non-cabatants, including, in addition to The Holocaust, the holocausts-in-their-own-right of Dresden, of the Japanese cities. The cure a holocaust itself, it could be argued. Such a “cure” might warrant at least a tentative questioning of the cost-benefit equation. Will we at some point come to ask, with all due respect to the past and yes, absolutely, 20/20 hindsight, Monday morning quarterbacking and all that, would there really not have been another way?
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