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196 of 200 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An enlightening book, February 1, 2000
I am the kind of history and war buff that loves to read straightforward war books: books about battles, generals, soldiers, tactics, blunders, strategies, weapons and so on. Having read a review of Fussell's book a few years ago and thinking it was another "straightforward" book about World War One, I added it to my Christmas list. I received it as a gift this year (along with about 6 other books, all novels) and I decided to browse it for fifteen minutes before diving into one of the novels. What struck me at first was that it was NOT a straightforward telling of WWI, and that if I had looked at the book in a bookstore I probably would have thought it "boring" and set it back on the shelf. You see, in this book there are no detailed accounts of the Somme or in-depth analysis of Ypres. However, having book in hand, I was immediately drawn into Fussell's examination and analysis of literature, essays, poetry, letters home, theater and culture on the front and in England during WWI in order to paint a picture of the British soldiers' experience during WWI. It is a fascinating book on many levels and examines war, in this instance The Great War, from a completely different aspect than I have ever seen before. Fussell illuminates much more clearly what happened to the boys/men in the trenches than anything I have ever read before. For instance, has any other book captured so vividly the oppressiveness of being in a trench for days when all you see is a sliver of sky and the horrific irony of morning and evening stand-to's? I don't think I have read a book that made me sympathize and empathize with the WWI soldier more than this book. It is a deeply moving and touching book and really drives home the futility of war. I know that this book will not appeal to everyone (as I said earlier, it probably wouldn't have appealed to me had I picked it up in a bookstore), but I believe that most people will find it fascinating if they just put their minds to it. Fussell's book will reward those seeking a deeper understanding of the WWI soldiers' experience.
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108 of 111 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
HOW THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEGAN, January 24, 2000
Centuries don't begin on time; the Twentieth didn't begin on January 1, 1900 (or 1901). Literary critic Paul Fussell located our century's birth in the appalling trenches of World War I in his insightful and thoroughly documented book, The Great War and Modern Memory. It is hard to overpraise this book. I read the paperback in the late 1980s and reread it again last week. It is first and foremost a World War I British intellectual (literary) history but much, much more. Fussell is at home with the British literary heritage, which he shares with the poets and writers of the early 20th century. He covers in detail the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves (of I, Claudius fame) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, along with many others. We return to 1914, when there was no radio, no TV, no movies to speak of, and when the populace had implicit faith in their press, their King and "progress." The central irony of this book was that the population rushed to support the war in order to support these 19th century ideals, ideals which would be shattered in the war that gave birth to the twentieth century. Fussell documents how World War I gave us the standardized form, the wristwatch, daylight savings time, civilian censorship and bureaucratic euphemism--and for the first time, despair that technology was driving civilization into perpetual war. So The Great War and Modern Memory is not just a literary anthology; it has elements of political and social history and even (in the chapter titled "Soldier Boys" and for lack of a better term) what would come to be called Gay Studies. It is no accident that Fussell was a soldier himself (in World War II) and his sympathies lie with the common "grunt"; he does not mince words. This is a wonderful book and it's hard to come away without learning something. The book introduced me to writers I wasn't familiar with; it also broadened my knowledge of the Great War and fleshed out my rather la-di-da, "Upstairs Downstairs" view of Edwardian England. Most important, it got under my skin--I've thought about the book on and off for the past 14 years. Few books do that to me--I would rank this up there with Ann Douglas' The Feminization of American Culture as a milestone of intellectual history and, like her work, you don't have to accept the central thesis to have a great time reading it.
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The world and the English language changed after WWI., March 27, 1997
By A Customer
Once upon a time, I was actually a witness in a civil trial. I was called upon to explain, as an editor of an employee manual, my use of the word "draft," as in, "This employee manual is a draft." The word "Draft" meant one thing to me ("welcoming improvements") and another thing entirely to my employer, one of the parties in the suit (to him it meant, "I don't have to follow the parts that are inconvenient, like due process"). The judge blasted me exasperatedly, "Well, doesn't the word mean exactly what it says?" I answered him, "Your honor, no word ever means exactly what it says---connotation changes all the time."
The subject of the connotations of words recalls one of my favorite books of all time, Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modrn Memory." The thesis of this masterwork suggests that the modern world began on July 1, 1916, on a trench-riddled field near the River Somme, where Sir Douglas Haig, commander of British forces, sent 110,000 men against a German force one-seventh that size in "the largest engagement fought since the beginnings of civilization" (as Fussell puts it). On this one day, 60,000 men were killed or wounded, "the record so far." Fussell argues that the world changed enormously after the Somme affair (the surviving soldiers reserved earthier epithets for the campaign).
Fussell's use of the word "record," with its echoes of sporting statistics, is indicative of the innocence with which British soldiers entered into warfare. There are documented accounts in which British soldiers actually preceded a charge by kicking a soccer ball toward the opposing trenches; that sort of gesture quickly lost its luster in the face of a military revolution that saw the first uses of machine guns, tanks, and poison gas.
How innocent was the era preceding the Great War? As Fussell says, "The literary scene is hard to imagine." There was no "Waste Land," no "Ulysses," no "Cantos," no Kafka, no "Lady Chatterley's Lover," no "Valley of Ashes" from "The Great Gatsby." In the literature of war before the Great War, "high" diction prevailed. Gallant warriors assailed the foe, keen to take the field in a contest in which fate might leave their comrades among the fallen, facing the heavens, their limbs askew, their breasts slumbering, the red sweet wine of youth staining the battleground of honor. After 1916, the disillusioned men and the writers who chronicled their actions were more likely to characterize their experiences in the manner of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," in which "the blood/Come[s] gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/ Bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores . . . ." Only the generals, "the enemy behind," who were steeped in Kipling and Tennyson, could have had the obtusenesss to promulgate at the end of the war, with no apparent awareness of its irony, the following directive: "There will be no intercourse of any description with the enemy."
The vocabulary of the Great War has insinuated itself so firmly into our consciousness that it's hard to recognize its origins. The source of "entrenched" is obvious. "Crummy" and "lousy" originated in the ubiquitous infestations of lice. Spending several years in France caused the word "keepsake" to be replace by the French word
"souvenir." Economic terms like "the private sector" and "rank and file" were appropriated from the war. Even an expression as innocuous as "Help our fund drive over the top" owes its imagery to a military strategy of attrition that, in its incompetence, might, in another age, have elicited prosecutions for war crimes---against generals for needlessly killing their own men. Perhaps even Fussell himself did not recognize the irony in his use of the word "civilization" to describe the evolution of humankind to a place where such actions could lead to such words.
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