This is an edited version of a powerful, passionate introduction given by author Wade Davis at the recent British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction event in Vancouver. In it, Davis praises the work of Margaret MacMillan in her book, The War That Ended Peace. (The award went to Thomas King for An Inconvenient Indian.)
Everything you know of your life, every sense you have of being modern, every existential doubt, each burst of confusion, every neurotic affirmation or affliction was born of the mud, blood and agony of Flanders.
The Great War was the fulcrum of modernity. Jazz, Joyce, Dali, Cocteau, Hitler, Mao and Stalin were all offspring of the carnage. Darwin, Freud and Einstein were men of the 19th century but their ideas — that species were mutable, that you did not control the sanctity of your own thoughts, that an apple does not fall from the tree as simply as Newton described — came to fruition in the wake of the conflict, as if sown in soil fertilized by the dead.
For a century Europe had been at peace, even as industry and technology created wealth and military power beyond anything that had ever been known. European powers consumed the world until the boundaries of colonial ambitions tightened like a noose around the neck of civilization.
Then a single bullet fired in the summer of 1914 into the breast of a prince in Sarajevo shattered a universe, a realm of certainty, optimism, hope and faith, and in doing so sparked the greatest cataclysm in the history of humanity.
The Second World War was but the child of the First. Winston Churchill called it the Thirty Years War. Never was there a war less necessary to fight than the first, he wrote, or more essential to win than the second.
At the outbreak of the conflict, a man had to stand five-foot-eight to enter the British army. Within two months, boys five-foot-three were eagerly recruited.
Cremation, virtually unknown in Britain before the war, in its wake became the preferred form of disposing of the dead for tens of thousands who had for four years and four months endured the sight and scent of rotten corpses in the shell holes of No Man's Land.
Plastic surgery was born of the war, and the need to repair the shell-scarred faces of young boys who would live their lives behind wooden masks, attending special holiday camps where they might remove the masks and feel the wind on their gargoyle features without shame or humiliation.
The regular army of Empire required 2,500 shovels a year. In the mud of Flanders, 10 million would be required. 25,000 British coal miners spent the war underground, ferreting beneath the German lines to lay charges that detonated with such explosive force as to be heard on Hampstead Heath in London.
Bayonets accounted for but a third of one per cent of casualties. Rifle fire and machine guns brought down 35 per cent of the dead and wounded. Most who died did so clinging helplessly in terror to the mud wall of a trench as a rain of steel and fire fell from the sky.
In 10 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Americans have yet to lose 10,000 dead. In the Great War the British Army required 10,000 junior officers alone every month to replace the litany of dead. Public schools such as Charterhouse, Eton, Winchester and Marlborough graduated their senior classes not to Oxford or Cambridge but directly to the trenches, where chances of survival for a subaltern were one in two.
Before the war, the total cost of running the Empire was 500,000 pounds a day. The war would cost five million pounds a day. Taxes and death duties alone provoked such economic agonies that between 1918 and 1921 a quarter of all English land would change hands. Nothing like it had occurred in Britain since the Norman Conquest.
Women spoke of the war through the metaphor of dance. "By the end of 1916," Diana Manners famously remarked, "every boy I had ever danced with was dead." Vera Brittain, who lost her brother, fiancé and two best friends, said simply that by the war there was no one left to dance with. The poet Stephen Spender remarked that the British middle class continued to dance, unaware that the dance floor had fallen out from beneath them.
To read Margaret MacMillan's The War That Ended Peace is to understand how all of this began. The pettiness of men in power, their peacock vanities and wrathful pride, their misplaced fidelities and fatal sense of honour, their pious certainties .... As I read this beautiful yet haunting book, essentially an account of how five score men in power in a half-dozen nations stumbled toward the final hour, plunging civilization itself into an abyss from which it would never emerge, I found myself wanting to scream, stop, for the love of God stop.
Nine million would die. Men of discretion and decorum, a generation unprepared to litter the world with itself, unwilling to yield feelings to analysis, yet individuals so confident in their masculinity that they could speak of love between men without shame, collect butterflies in the dawn, paint water colours in late morning, discuss Keats and Shelley over lunch, and still be prepared to attack the German lines at dusk. They were men the likes of which we will never know again. They were our grandfathers.
The War That Ended Peace is not just a book; it is a testament for the ages.
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