I’ve tried since the summer of 2014 — the centennial of World War I’s beginning —to get my mind around that war and what happened after. All Quiet on the Western Front. Hemingway’s novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. And the poetry. The poetry!

We are the Dead

The melancholy of manhood cut short in John McCrae’s “Flanders Fields”:

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

 The mournful cry of a woman whose 20-year-old fiancé was killed by a sniper only four months after they became engaged to be married, Vera Brittain’s “Perhaps“:

But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.

 And, like a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the one that most stays with me, Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est.” It ends:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

The Latin means “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” It is taken from the Roman poet Horace, who wrote just before Jesus was born. Many of the soldiers in the trenches would have known it, and believed it before they went to war.

A Sense of Emptiness

It’s weird that World War II, a more straightforward tale of good vs. evil for the history books, didn’t produce the same literary output as World War I. In the last four years I have read as much of the World War I stuff as I could, as much as time would allow.

And my takeaway from it is a profound sense of emptiness. Of a world that abandoned God and paid the price for it.

“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country” is not always a lie. But when states murder men by the millions without just cause, it becomes a lie. The lack of trust that results from that lie, and from the death it brings, spreads like a cancer to every source of societal authority. Even the loving Fatherhood of God Himself is called into question.

For those of us alive today, the closest parallel may be Vietnam. So many lost for a goal not achieved. Such a profoundly detrimental effect on society. So much trust lost, perhaps forever. “If you had seen the death, my friend, you would not tell the old lie.”

But World War I, or its aftermath, was the 1960s before we had the 1960s. The bad things we associate with the 60s, the tanking of Western Civilization, really happened then. That’s one thing the poetry tells us.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” said the British Foreign Secretary on the eve of World War I. One hundred years later, they still haven’t been re-lit. Not permanently. One hundred years later, Christendom has only grown dimmer.