Many of the intellectual consequences of the war were much more indirect and took years to manifest themselves. The subject is vast, engrossing, easily worth the several books that have been devoted to it.8 The sheer carnage, the military stalemate that so characterised the hostilities that took place between 1914 and 1918, and the lopsided nature of the armistice all became ingrained in the mentality of the age, and later ages. The Russian Revolution, which occurred in the middle of the war, brought about its own distorted political, military, and intellectual landscape, which would last for seventy years. This chapter will concentrate on ideas and intellectual happenings that were introduced during World War I and that can be understood as a direct response to the fighting.
Paul Fussell, in The Great War in Modern Memory, gives one of the most clear-eyed and harrowing accounts of World War I. He notes that the toll on human life even at the beginning of the war was so horrific that the height requirement for the British army was swiftly reduced from five feet eight in August 1914 to five feet five on 11 October.9 By $ November, after thirty thousand casualties in October, men had to be only five feet three to get in. Lord Kitchener, secretary of state for war, asked at the end of October for 300,000 volunteers. By early 1916 there were no longer enough volunteers to replace those that had already been killed or wounded, and Britain’s first conscript army was installed, ‘an event which could be said to mark the beginning of the modern world.’10 General Douglas Haig, commander in chief of the British forces, and his staff devoted the first half of that year to devising a massive offensive.
World War I had begun as a conflict between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But Germany had allied itself with Austro-Hungary, forming the Central Powers, and Serbia had appealed to Russia. Germany mobilised in response, to be followed by Britain and France, which asked Germany to respect the neutrality of Belgium. In early August 1914 Russia invaded East Prussia on the same day that Germany occupied Luxembourg. Two days later, on 4 August, Germany declared war on France, and Britain declared war on Germany. Almost without meaning to, the world tumbled into a general conflict.
After six months’ preparation, the Battle of the Somme got under way at seven-thirty on the morning of I July 1916. Previously, Haig had ordered the bombardment of the German trenches for a week, with a million and a half shells fired from 1,500 guns. This may well rank as the most unimaginative military manoeuvre of all time – it certainly lacked any element of surprise. As Fussell shows, ‘by 7.31’ the Germans had moved their guns out of the dugouts where they had successfully withstood the previous week’s bombardment and set up on higher ground (the British had no idea how well dug in the Germans were). Out of the 110,000 British troops who attacked that morning along the thirteen-mile front of the Somme, no fewer than 60,000 were killed or wounded on the first day, still a record. ‘Over 20,000 lay dead between the lines, and it was days before the wounded in No Man’s Land stopped crying out.’11 Lack of imagination was only one cause of the disaster. It may be too much to lay the blame on social Darwinist thinking, but the British General Staff did hold the view that the new conscripts were a low form of life (mainly from the Midlands), too simple and too animal to obey any but the most obvious instructions.12 That is one reason why the attack was carried out in daylight and in a straight line, the staff feeling the men would be confused if they had to attack at night, or by zigzagging from cover to cover. Although the British by then had the tank, only thirty-two were used ‘because the cavalry preferred horses.’ The disaster of the Somme was almost paralleled by the attack on Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Part of the infamous Ypres Salient, this was a raised area of ground surrounded on three sides by German forces. The attack lasted five days, gained 7,000 yards, and cost 160,000 killed and wounded – more than twenty casualties for each yard of ground that was won.13
Passchendaele was supposed to be an attack aimed at the German submarine bases on the Belgian coast. Once again the ground was ‘prepared’ by artillery fire – 4 million shells over ten days. Amid heavy rain, the only effect was to churn up the mud into a quagmire that impeded the assault forces. Those who weren’t killed by gun- or shell-fire died either from cold or literally drowned in the mud. British losses numbered 370,000. Throughout the war, some 7,000 officers and men were killed or wounded every day: this was called ‘wastage.’14 By the end of the war, half the British army was aged less than nineteen.15 No wonder people talked about a ‘lost generation.’
The most brutally direct effects of the war lay in medicine and psychology. Major developments were made in the understanding of cosmetic surgery and vitamins that would eventually lead to our current concern with a healthy diet. But the advances that were of the most immediate importance were in blood physiology, while the most contentious innovation was the IQ – Intelligence Quotient – test. The war also helped in the much greater acceptance afterwards of psychiatry, including psychoanalysis.*
It has been estimated that of some 56 million men called to arms in World War I, around 26 million were casualties.16 The nature of the injuries sustained was different from that of other wars insofar as high explosives were much more powerful and much more frequently used than before. This meant more wounds of torn rather than punctured flesh, and many more dismemberments, thanks to the machine gun’s ‘rapid rattle.’ Gunshot wounds to the face were also much more common because of the exigencies of trench warfare; very often the head was the only target for riflemen and gunners in the opposing dugouts (steel helmets were not introduced until the end of 1915). This was also the first major conflict in which bombs and bullets rained down from the skies. As the war raged on, airmen began to fear fire most of all. Given all this, the unprecedented nature of the challenge to medical science is readily appreciated. Men were disfigured beyond recognition, and the modern science of cosmetic surgery evolved to meet this dreadful set of circumstances. Hippocrates rightly remarked that war is the proper school for surgeons.
Whether a wound disfigured a lot or a little, it was invariably accompanied by the loss of blood. A much greater understanding of blood was the second important medical advance of the war. Before 1914, blood transfusion was virtually unknown. By the end of hostilities, it was almost routine.17 William Harvey had discovered the circulation of the blood in 1616, but it was not until 1907 that a doctor in Prague, Jan Jansky, showed that all human blood could be divided into four groups, O, A, B, and AB, distributed among European populations in fairly stable proportions.18 This identification of blood groups showed why, in the past, so many transfusions hadn’t worked, and patients had died. But there remained the problem of clotting: blood taken from a donor would clot in a matter of moments if it was not immediately transferred to a recipient.19 The answer to this problem was also found in 1914, when two separate researchers in New York and Buenos Aires announced, quite independently of each other and almost at the same time, that a 0.2 percent solution of sodium citrate acted as an efficient anticoagulant and that it was virtually harmless to the patient.20 Richard Lewisohn, the New York end of this duo, perfected the dosage, and two years later, in the killing fields of France, it had become a routine method for treating haemorrhage.21 Kenneth Walker, who was one of the pioneers of blood transfusion, wrote in his memoirs, ‘News of my arrival spread rapidly in the trenches and had an excellent effect on the morale of the raiding party. “There’s a bloke arrived from G.H.Q. who pumps blood into you and brings you back to life even after you’re dead,” was very gratifying news for those who were about to gamble with their lives.’22