The Enduring Impact of World War I - The New York Times - 0 views
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the bloodiest episode of combat in human history, generating 60,000 casualties in a single day
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but its occurrence in a television program that is acutely sensitive to historical accuracy is a sign of just how deeply, if in some ways obscurely, World War I remains embedded in the popular consciousness.
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“the war to end all wars,” it has instead become the war to which all subsequent wars, and much else in modern life, seem to refer.
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a tradition that included not only martial epics and popular adventure novels but also religious and romantic allegories like John Bunyan’s
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That soldier, in turn, with some adjustments of outfit and equipment, would march through the subsequent decades, leaving behind a corpus of remarkably consistent firsthand testimony.
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This was clear enough to Larkin, whose patriotism rested on the notion that England was the worst place on earth with the possible exception of everywhere else.
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The title of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien’s cycle of autobiographical stories about life before, during and after combat in Vietnam,
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“There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.
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arkin’s subject is less the war as such than a faded England of “archaic faces” and bygone habits, an England that ceased to exist sometime
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arkin also suggests that it is complicated, even deceptive. Individuals like the anonymous children and husbands
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ccounts of that summer, especially in France and Britain, frequently emphasize beautiful weather and holiday pleasures.
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A lovely example of the interplay of empirical reality and literary embellishment: the meteorological record will attest to the color and clarity of the sky, but only the cruel, corrective irony of hindsight can summon the word “optimistic.”
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chapters will also make clear the extent to which that “civilization,” so intoxicated by its own rhetoric of national glory and heroic destiny
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After Sept. 11, 2001, we were told — we told ourselves — that everything had changed. In a curious reversal of the logic of the Great War, the
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Ordinary soldiers were routinely referred to as “heroes” and “warriors,” even as their deaths and injuries were kept from public view.
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But the Great War is not quite finished with us. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have wound down in bloody inconclusiveness, the men and women who served in them have started writing,
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The book belongs in the irreverent company of “Catch-22,” which is to say on the same shelf as “All Quiet on the Western Front” and Chevalier’s “Fear.”
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“The Things They Carried.” A deceptively modest collection of linked short stories, “Redeployment” bristles with place names,
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who derived a stark lesson from his own experience at the Battle of the Somme: “The War had won, and would go on winning.”