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The Great War and Modern Memory

Paul Fussell,

Jay Murray Winter (Introduction)

4.18 · Rating details · 5,124 ratings · 262 reviews

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapo ...more

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Paperback, 414 pages

Published June 12th 2013 by Oxford University Press, USA (first published January 1st 1975)

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Aug 15, 2014 Warwick rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, literary-history, first-world-war

Very enjoyable, very thought-provoking, but not necessarily very convincing, Fussell's sui-generis book is an extended literary criticism masquerading as social history – or perhaps the other way round. There are various arguments going on in here, but the main thrust is that much of how we think about the modern world – indeed our whole contemporary mindset – has its origin in ideas that came about as an attempt to respond to the unprecedented scale and irony of the 1914-18 conflict.

‘Irony’ is ...more

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Oct 24, 2019 Trevor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, history, poetry

When Bill (aka Quo) recommended this to me a couple of weeks ago I really didn’t think I would get to it anytime soon. I also decided that it would be a military book or sorts, dealing, perhaps, with how what is remembered of a war isn’t necessarily what actually happened. If that had been what it was about, it would have been an interesting enough book, but this proved much better than I could have anticipated.

This book looks at how various (mostly British) writers wrote about the Great War and When Bill (aka Quo) recommended this to me a couple of weeks ago I really didn’t think I would get to it anytime soon. I also decided that it would be a military book or sorts, dealing, perhaps, with how what is remembered of a war isn’t necessarily what actually happened. If that had been what it was about, it would have been an interesting enough book, but this proved much better than I could have anticipated.

This book looks at how various (mostly British) writers wrote about the Great War and what their writing about the war meant for modern literature, and therefore how we then came to understand that war (and all wars subsequent to it). It also provides insight into what people 'wrote home' - so, normal writers too, not just poets and writers.

This is a glorious book. I have learnt so much from it, and as a piece of literary criticism I was thinking that it is perhaps as good an introduction to that subject as you can find. There are lovely bits to this. His discussion of the power of the number three throughout much of the English literary canon was masterful. He links this back to Christian imagery: innocence, the fall, redemption – and so you can see how this might be used when people were struggling to work out how they might represent this most horrible of wars.

The Great War was a mess of contradictions. Britain was even more divided by social class than it is now. As he says at one point, one’s social location was immediately apparent by the clothes one wore and the accent one spoke. But a large part of social distinction depends on a kind of social distance – and social distance was obliterated in the endlessly turning human meat mincing machine that trench warfare proved to be. And given 'one's betters' where the people responsible for the endless waste of life all around you, that hardly helped.

The horrors needed somehow to be comprehended – but many of the usual ways of doing this – writing down what you were experiencing and trying to make it understandable – were barred due to censorship of mail from the front. The government even issued printed form postcards that soldiers could essentially tick a box and then send home, something later mocked by writers such as Waugh.

I think the last couple of chapters here that discuss homosexuality are among the most interesting in the entire book. Throwing so many young men together is going to be a problem at the best of times, but having them constantly believe (and with total justification) that they were moments away from death, that was hardly likely to make things better. The death/sex unity idea is very strong here. But as the author says, homosexual acts were barred, but mass slaughter was encouraged.

One of the ‘threes’ that I mentioned before turns up when he talks of a soldier in the trenches whose commanding officer got everyone in his unit to count off in threes – so soldier after soldier called out one, two or three until the whole unit had a number dividing them into thirds. Then everyone who was numbered three had to ‘go over the top’ – something that would prove an immediate death sentence, and something everyone already knew. The soldier tries not to smile at his luck at not being numbered three, but, of course, the person beside him is. So, he fixed his eyes on the trench wall in front of him. Can you imagine? Dear God, what a complete nightmare. ‘I’m so glad it is you, rather than me…’

I didn’t know that poppies had been a symbol of homosexuality prior to the war. And the dedications to fellow soldiers that I would have just taken as being the sorts of things soldiers say to each other – that we will always be closer than brothers and so on – clearly often had much deeper meanings than I'd suspected.

At one point in this he says that Churchill believed that the First World War never really ended, or rather that it only ended at the end of the Second World War. Its impact on literature is probably continuing in many ways up to today. My own generation may be the last generation to have met and who remember people who fought in that war. As is made clear in this book, for many of those who fought it was a constant presence throughout the rest of their lives.

I really liked this book – it is anything but your standard book on military history. ...more

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Jul 30, 2008 Eric rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: war, criticism, history, poetry, great-war, men-of-letters, massacres

When war broke out, the undergraduate Robert Graves pictured what service he might render as garrison duty—literally holding down the fort while the professional Regular Army charged to glory on the continent. The 100,000-strong force of British Regulars ferried across the channel in August 1914 to protect Belgium and assist the French was all used up by early November. It is said, “the high command and the staff officers survived: the old army was beyond recall.” “This isn’t war!” cried an appa ...more

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Nov 16, 2018 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction, world-war-1, death-and-dying, language, literary-criticism, england, poetry, sexuality, france

This masterful book, published in 1975, provides a rewarding set of explorations in the way our experience of the war has been captured by literature and thereby filtered into our collective memory and understanding of it. Fussell focuses almost exclusively on the British experience at the Western Front, which includes, out of the 500 miles of the continuous line from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, the trenches of the Somme region of Picardy and of the Yrpes salient in Flanders. His thesis is ...more

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Jun 24, 2019 Richard Derus rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Read for a history course at Southwest Texas State in the 1980s. It was a before-and-after book: Before the Great War was retronymed "World War One" in my database, after it was not. That by itself was a huge reorientation of my thinking.

A friend called this read to mind today, and I got to thinking about historiography and its pleasures, the mental laziness of accepting the nonce-words bandied about instead of seeking out the contemporaneous views and language..."Armistice Day" instead of "Vete ...more

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Jul 10, 2013 Nick Milne rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: wwi

[Note: I've read this book twice, the first time years ago -- I set the read date as today so it updates on the Facebook wall properly.]

In this landmark text from 1975, Fussell (an American scholar and veteran) looks at a selection of writings from certain soldier-authors on the Western Front and examines the implications of same when it comes to how the war should best be understood. It's difficult to express how influential this book has been, or how widely it has been hailed since its publica ...more

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Sep 25, 2011 Rob rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: all-time-favourites, militaria, history

A great book. Using the tools of literary criticism to reflect on WW1, Fussell digs into how the war changed consciousness. It was the war Fussell argues, that makes the modern age an age of irony. Traditional notions of the war virtues like honour, valour and bravery disappeared into the shit and mud of the Western Front. The cynicism towards authority and the official view portrayed in newspapers etc. started in the war. The troops could read The Times or The Daily Mail in the trenches two day ...more

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Apr 26, 2017 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I rarely read non-fiction, but this just took my breath away. It's both a wonderful (and achingly sad) introduction to the poets and writers who emerged (or didn't) from World War I, as well as an eye-opening description of how that conflict shaped modern life. ...more

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Sep 10, 2011 Erin Deathstar rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Extraordinary. One of the best books I've read on WWI. By employing literary critique, Fussell manages to capture virtually every aspect of the war from its mammoth obscenity to its myriad tiny obscenities, to the beauties of light and birdsong as experienced in the trenches, to the social fabric of the poor doomed trench-bound souls, to the wit and wonder of The Wipers Times.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for conveying the vast and complex reality of WWI . Perhaps Fussell's idiosyn ...more

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Mar 26, 2015 Carol Storm rated it it was amazing

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY is the kind of war book that is especially cherished by people who feel morally obligated to "hate" war, or perhaps more accurately to hate the soldiers (mostly, but not always men) who fight it. Back in the days of Operation Desert Storm, when Barnard educated NY Times columnist Anna Quindlen was sneering at American combat troops as blue-collar rabble "not smart, not rich, not directed enough for college" she also found time to make a ritualistic little salute t THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY is the kind of war book that is especially cherished by people who feel morally obligated to "hate" war, or perhaps more accurately to hate the soldiers (mostly, but not always men) who fight it. Back in the days of Operation Desert Storm, when Barnard educated NY Times columnist Anna Quindlen was sneering at American combat troops as blue-collar rabble "not smart, not rich, not directed enough for college" she also found time to make a ritualistic little salute to "that graceful writer, Paul Fussell."

But you can't always judge a man by the friends he chooses -- or who choose him.

On one level, this certainly is an anti-war classic. Paul Fussell effectively dramatizes the horror, ugliness and futility of life in the trenches, using eyewitness accounts, historical records, and the best literature and poetry written after the war by the survivors. But the irony that may not be apparent to privileged noncombatants like Anna Quindlen is that the war (and its legacy) had a brutalizing effect on everyone, soldier and civilian alike.

Perhaps the most brilliant passage in the book describes how the war in the trenches, by its very nature, forced the combatants to see the men on the other side not as men at all but as a sub-human menace, as "the Other." Fussell describes how this way of thinking continued well after the war, and how it infected men from all walks of life. The faceless enemy of the trenches soon became "Tolkien's Orcs, Hitler's Jews, William Faulkner's Snopes Clan, Anthony Burgess' Alex and Droogs."

This is revelatory writing, full of fresh insight, and Fussell deserves full credit for the brilliance of his intellect and the scope of his vision. The irony, however, (and Paul Fussell appreciated irony far more than some of his later followers) is that the privileged elite who comprise today's anti-war left are themselves a product of the trenches. When she dismissed over one million men and women as "not smart, not rich, not directed enough for college," Anna Quindlen was herself upholding a long and dishonorable tradition. None of us were human to her then, or now. To her, and to the privileged who share her prejudices to this day in America, the men and women of the Armed Forces are themselves "the Huns," "the Pigs," "The Babykillers" "the Famine Irish," or simply "The Other."

Paul Fussell understood his followers a lot better than his followers understood him. ...more

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Jul 29, 2018 Jamie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history-military, history-military-ww1

Every war should have a guide like this, something to help later generations understand how the people who experienced the conflict interpreted their experiences. It makes me wonder how much of other wars we gloss over without grasping the context of things that mattered a great deal to the participants and shaped their actions and memories. The only other book I can think of that is as effective as The Great War and Modern Memory at interpreting soldiers and a society at war is Margaret Leech’s ...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Julie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An exceptional book, especially for those of us who appreciate the interconnections Fussell makes between literature and war. With a deft hand, he pulls together literary tradition right into the middle of the fray and opens the very heart of the wound. This is the first time I've truly understood war, and I see how it had to be done through literature. This will be a very personal book -- there will be lovers and haters. I can't imagine sitting on the fence on this one.

...more

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Jan 19, 2015 Steven Hull rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a difficult book to read. I first began reading The Great War and Modern Memory in 1979 and quit. Then eighteen months ago I tried again, got half way through and stopped. This time before starting, I committed finishing it within a two-eek period and was successful.

Paul Fussell (1924-2012) was a refreshing anomaly. Well educated (Pomona College and Harvard), erudite, and a true scholar (British literature), he was also a U.S. Army rifle platoon leader in World War II where he earned t This is a difficult book to read. I first began reading The Great War and Modern Memory in 1979 and quit. Then eighteen months ago I tried again, got half way through and stopped. This time before starting, I committed finishing it within a two-eek period and was successful.

Paul Fussell (1924-2012) was a refreshing anomaly. Well educated (Pomona College and Harvard), erudite, and a true scholar (British literature), he was also a U.S. Army rifle platoon leader in World War II where he earned the Bronze Star for valor and was seriously wounded. He was a successful academic, but received wider exposure and fame as a popular historian with such books as The Boy’s Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-45 and Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Fussell was also a pacifist—an articulate critic of the wastage of war. His own combat experiences were a constant life companion. While on a countryside drive with a friend later in life, Fussell admitted he could not travel over such ground without exercising a trained infantryman’s eye—here was the high ground, there were the ravines and possible flanking attack approaches, and just to the right were trees possibly with enemy observers or a sniper. He was also realistic. In war lives must sometimes be spent to save other lives. He thus remained a staunch advocate of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, remarking, “…the degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with the lack of information about the war.” Knowing about him was extraordinarily helpful in understanding The Great War and Modern Memory. Although Fussell’s war came two decades after the Great War (World War I) this book is autobiographical—Fussell’s tool for giving meaning and understanding to his and his generation’s own war, World War II.

The Great War and Modern Memory is organized topically. It focuses on the 1914-1918 experience of the British Army on the Western Front. These were four years of static, costly trench warfare conducted under the most horrible conditions. Human life was less than cheap as millions died in meaningless offensives with 18th Century tactics pitted against 20th Century industrial killing technologies. Readers expecting a chronological narrative of the Great War will be disappointed. Fussell’s goal is to give meaning and understanding to the slaughter through the exploration of pre-, contemporary, and post-war literature, primarily British. This is a tall order. This body of literature lacked, for most of this time period, the mental models, socially acceptable language, and hardened, realistic voices to describe the inconceivable horror the front lines represented. Fussell slights the routine motif for describing death on a mass scale—the listing of the large numbers of personnel engaged in the fighting, noting of the percentage of killed and wounded divided by the time engaged, and the meters of ground exchanged at exorbitant cost in human suffering and death. Instead, he endeavors to personalize this horror through the understanding of literature. In doing so, he reveals the deep sorrow and regret felt by many who fought and gives permission for those who felt this way to be venerated above those celebrating the crass militarism and disguised glory of ‘victory’. This is pacifism at its best, pacifism as strength and sanity, not unpatriotic weakness.

Fussell sees the Great War as a historical fault line. It begins the mass understanding of war as irony. The means for waging it, for example, were far worse than the ends it was to achieve. The initial adjectives describing the fighting (glorious sacrifice, righteousness cause et al.) failed in every way, ironically, to describe the reality of the fighting. Even the outbreak of the war in 1914 was ironic. Europe, now in the latter portion of the modern age of imperialism, was prospering economically, socially, culturally, and politically. Ethnic and nationalistic strife was acute, but had been managed through a series of recent conflicts in the Balkans. The weather in the summer of 1914 had been particularly pleasant. The likely location for an outbreak of conflict in the minds of the British would be occurring in Ulster, not Serbia. Rationally speaking, a European-wide war made no sense. How ironic that the Great War would rapidly unfold and ultimately engulf and destroy the old European dictated world order in such an unexpected fashion.

Ways of conceptualizing war receded and died and new ways emerged as a consequence of the Great War. Fussell notes, “The drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable. And the catastrophe that begins it is the Great War”. Much of the book addresses how descriptive literature challenged this ‘normalization’ and evolved to cope with the physical and psychological devastation wrought by the war. Several war poets’ journeys (including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Rupert Brook) from patriotic innocence to intense criticism of the war are chronicled. It is clear, however, that the literature did not change quickly enough to become an accurate descriptive tool for what occurred on the Western Front while the war was being waged. Rather, it evolved over time, a long time. According to Fussell, it is the World War II generation and beyond that accurately describes in grotesque and pornographic ways, modern warfare—especially its psychological consequences on those caught up in the fighting. Norman Mailer, James Jones, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon leverage the changes in social mores, following the Great War and especially World War II, to graphically explore modern war’s impact on the human psyche first experienced in the Great War. As Fussell notes, “Ex post facto, literary narrative has supplied it (the Great War) with coherence and irony, educing the pattern: innocence savaged and destroyed. Or, if not destroyed, transformed into utterly what Frye calls ‘the total cultural form, of our present life’”.

Why should this book be read? It is in many ways obscure and remote. It is certainly not an ‘everyman’s’ guide to understanding the death, destruction, and desolation of modern warfare. More than anything it is a log of Fussell’s own journey from childhood innocence to the reality of his own war experiences. Thankfully most of us will never embark on a similar journey. World wars for the moment seem remote possibilities and conscripted legions of citizens are not needed for national defense. Yet, we remain surrounded by war. Those engaged in the fighting remain small in number. We are permanent strangers to their war lives. We fete them, thank them for their service, and know nothing of what we speak. Yet, we do not hesitate to support sending them in harms way on our behalf. Rare among us are those that question the sending or the repetitive platitudes used as justification.

Fussell in the Great War and Modern Memory challenges us to make our own imperfect journey into the jaws of modern war and seek understanding in our own dark mind spaces. To do this we must read further—All is Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque), The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Siegfried Sassoon), Undertones of War (Edmund Blunden Good-bye to All That (Robert Graves), The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer), The Thin Red Line (James Jones), and Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon). What is likely to emerge is war’s ugly realities and reason for each of us to question every rationale that sends soldiers, sailors, airmen coastguardsmen, and marines to kill others in the name of the United States.
...more

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Jan 19, 2018 Murtaza rated it liked it · review of another edition

In many ways the First World War dealt Europe ("Western civilization") a blow from which it has never truly recovered. This book is an examination of the cultural and psychological impact of the war which uses literary criticism as a tool of mapping the changes that it wrought in people's thinking and emotions. Fussell makes draws some very broad conclusions that aren't necessarily convincing given the evidence that he cites. But the arguments he makes are fascinating and enjoyable to contemplat In many ways the First World War dealt Europe ("Western civilization") a blow from which it has never truly recovered. This book is an examination of the cultural and psychological impact of the war which uses literary criticism as a tool of mapping the changes that it wrought in people's thinking and emotions. Fussell makes draws some very broad conclusions that aren't necessarily convincing given the evidence that he cites. But the arguments he makes are fascinating and enjoyable to contemplate, with a bonus being that he ends up giving a tour of the incredible poetry and literature during that era.

Fussell reviews the work of a couple of WWI veteran writers that most people will be familiar with, including Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and, briefly, Erich Maria Remarque. From these reviews he suggests that certain key aspects of our modern mindset arose from the war. Among these, the most interesting to me was the suggestion that our contemporary obsession with irony was a product of the WWI battlefields. "Never such innocence again," was a famous refrain born from the horrors of the war. As many writers have reflected, prior to the conflict Europe had a completely different and much more confident view of itself. Most importantly, its highest ideals were genuinely believed and not considered to be naked hypocrisies. Concepts such as beauty, love, honor and courage were sincerely held in popular esteem, without a sense that any of them were somehow ridiculous or even nonexistent.

In accordance with their self-image, when the war broke out people were expecting it to be something honorable, adventurous and ennobling. They expected something that comported with the self-image of their societies, which, after over a century of what seemed to have been genuine moral advance, had left barbarism behind forever.

The pointless bloodbath that actually ensued was so different from the glorious image hoped for, and so horrifying, that it led to the widespread emergence of "irony" among those who were forced to confront the grim reality. The huge gap between the aimlessly bestial nature of the war and the patriotic, encouraging news reports fed to civilians only exacerbated this ironic sense. It gave rise to the phenomena of black humor among the troops, young men who could never again take seriously the noble ideals professed by their societies.

Fussell's argument is impossible to verify here, but it is a fascinating idea. I would also argue that it bears continued reflection today, given the almost invincibly ironic cast of our contemporary popular culture and humor. Irony seems to provide something of a mental and emotional armor against the reality of the world, which is often difficult to deal with on its own terms. But it may also contribute to an inability to engage with the higher values that are perhaps necessary for individuals and society as a whole to flourish. In many ways the victory of irony has meant the death of genuine moral reflection, because it makes it seem as though nothing high-minded in the world can actually exist or be aspired to. As Hemmingway wrote, “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” It might be that the death of those concepts and the birth of ironic thinking has its origins in the terrible realities of the war.

Beyond the meditations on irony, there are some darkly amusing segments showing how great the desire of the soldiers was to kill the civilians of their own societies for sending them into "The War," a beastly presence that for many participants had become an independent metaphysical actor. It was also sobering to realize how close the war fronts were to people's homes, so much so that people going about their daily business in much of England could clearly hear the shelling and explosions taking place in France. For soldiers, their physical proximity to the safety, enjoyment and hypocrisy of home made the inhuman experience of the frontlines even more jarring.

World War I also gave birth to the idea that endless war may be a feature of the suddenly terrifying technological modernity that people had found themselves plunged into. There had never been an industrialized war like this before in Europe, or anywhere in the world. After the horrifying reality of what a modern war was like began to dawn on people, many quite reasonably began to feel that endless war actually might be an inherent feature of modernity, just like the radio, refrigerator and air travel, also new phenomena. As such many began to fear that the incredibly bloody stalemate on the frontlines was perhaps not an aberration. It was going to continue on forever, as long as the modern world continued to exist, because it was simply a part of its nature.

While this fear wasn't exactly true, to this day new technologies - unmoored from a strong moral framework - keep opening up unexpected new ways for cruelty and inhumanity to express themselves. "The drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable," Fussell writes. Looking at drone warfare, cluster bombs, white phosphorus attacks and other horrifying phenomena that have now become "normal," it is hard to conclude that he was wrong about this. Another quote cited by Fussell reminding readers of this grim reality was from Liddell Hart. Describing the new technology of poison gas, Liddell wrote that it was in reality “the least inhumane of modern weapons," claiming that in fact its bad press was purely the result of its novelty, compared with ordinary bombs and bullets. “It was novel and therefore labelled an atrocity by a world which condones abuses but detests innovation," Hart wrote.

Among Fuessell's other arguments, I wasn't particularly convinced that the Us. vs. Them mentality of the modern world came out of World War I specifically, nor some of the other claims less interesting claims that he made based on his literary citations. In my opinion, the book started off on its strongest arguments and then tapered off a bit into a more basic retinue of literary criticism.

Nonetheless, I really enjoyed it. And perhaps the biggest reason was become of the extended tour Fussell gives of poetry from the war. A particularly moving one, that I'll conclude with, was Laurence Binyon's reflection on the loss of a generation of young men in the trenches, entitled, "For the Fallen:"

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
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Apr 29, 2015 Checkman rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, history, non-fiction

Paul Fussell's now classic examination at how World War I is remembered by looking at British literature - both fiction and non-fiction. This is not a military history of World War I though Fussell does provide some background in order to put things into context. It's a literary criticism. If you're interested in how a historical event comes to be percieved by later generations then you'll find this an interesting read.

It has been pointed out by some that this book is now out of date and Fussel ...more

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May 29, 2017 Robert rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

THE WAR THAT MADE US WHO WE ARE
Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is a tour de force and more than a tour de force. It could easily be the single book assigned for a semester-long graduate seminar focusing on how Great Britain’s literary culture helped shape contemporary understanding of World War I–casting it in romantic, pastoral, theatrical and homoerotic terms–and how World War I returned the favor by shaping the western world’s literature thereafter.

The unspeakable folly THE WAR THAT MADE US WHO WE ARE
Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is a tour de force and more than a tour de force. It could easily be the single book assigned for a semester-long graduate seminar focusing on how Great Britain’s literary culture helped shape contemporary understanding of World War I–casting it in romantic, pastoral, theatrical and homoerotic terms–and how World War I returned the favor by shaping the western world’s literature thereafter.

The unspeakable folly and stupidity of WWI and how it was fought, trench warfare with assaults at times killing fifty thousand soldiers in a single day, beggared the imagination, driving the likes of Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Siegried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden to scour their lifelong reading from past centuries to find, here and there, hints as to how such darkness could be made visible.

Fussell demonstrates a mastery not only of professional memoirists’ and poets’ attempts to come to terms with the carnage but also deep knowledge of how Everyman the Letter-Writer portrayed his ghastly experience through the cultural filters of stiff upper lips, the nobility of service, and the tropes of putting on a good show.

At one and the same time this is a study that rests on the shoulders of Fussell’s exceptional erudition and his apparently indefatigable efforts to mine the Imperial War Museum’s archives for epistolary realia that demonstrates, year by year, how the molds of culture were filled to overfilling and then broke.

No one knew the meaning of trenches or machine-guns until WWI brought them together in a stalemate of slaughter, 1914-1918. Fussell illustrates this better than almost anyone. He is at ease with the English writers of the times, with their American counterparts–Hemingway, Dos Passos–and with their successors– a Norman Mailer, a Ted Hughes, a Thomas Pynchon.

Because there are so many aptly chosen quotes, embedded within extremely acute commentary, this is not light reading. Fussell’s expositions of individual poems are masterful, his judgment is excellent. And he does the same with essays and novels, demonstrating repeatedly how WWI never really ended, always thereafter framed human experience as Winston Churchill saw it–war and then more war. When a Norman Mailer inserts parapets into his WWII novel, The Naked and the Dead, he writes with larcenous irony. There were no parapets from which you might be shot in WWII, but the feeling of WWI parapets, where what you were looking out for ended up being your onrushing death, lingered as a useful symbol of what war, any war, is all about: exposing yourself to dying and then doing it, getting yourself killed, having done with it so the next man might have his chance.

Fussell’s own story is fascinating. He saw heavy fighting in WWII, returned to the US to get a PhD in English, and then dutifully wrote the books he knew a rising academic was supposed to write, purely literary studies. Once tenured, he told himself the time had come to write a book he wanted to write, and so he produced this unique study of literature not as Rapunzel in her tower but as Penthesilea in battle. The actual uses of literature, and culture in general, have seldom been so well presented, playing a prominent role in the affairs of nations and mankind, teaching the dumbfounded what and how to think about the dumb things they are doing. This social dimension of literature increasingly has become familiar in academe since Fussell’s time, but it was fairly controversial back in 1975. What makes it convincing, in this case, is Fussell’s astonishing command of his subject, both the war and the not so belles-lettres that crawled into and it through it and live to this day. Here we have verse, lice, rats, religion, mustard gas, Arcadian imagery, Milton, and Pynchon’s shit-eating Brigadier Pudding.

Ultimately, what we see is the transformation of passing horror into a foundational myth–an origin myth–of the modern world. WWI let us see who we are.
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Dec 02, 2011 Jeff rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Paul Fussell raises a provocative question in his most acclaimed nonfiction work The Great War and Modern Memory: What happened to the world between 1914 and 1918? His shocking but illuminating conclusion is that the mindset of an entire generation completely changed. How we write poetry, how we talk about war, how we see reality. His study delves into the poetry and prose of the First World War, focusing primarily on the British experience whose countrymen endured the horrors of the war at leas ...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Caroline rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: british-history, world-war-1

It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of this book. It's definitely one of the landmark publications on Great War literature, and Fussell's arguments and conclusions are so lucid and compelling that you almost find it strange that no-one else thought of it before him.

Each chapter draws on a central theme found throughout the war poetry; the binary oppositions of 'us' and 'them', the troglodyte horrors of the trenches, the comparison of the war to theatre, the homoeroticism of soldie ...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is a most remarkable book. Over the years I have read quite a bit of history, but never a book quite like this one - it is thoroughly unique. It brings together poetry, literature, language, and all sorts of events that changed our way of speaking and thinking of war forever. All this was done in one fairly small book. Some might find it a little scholarly, but never, in my opinion, was it petulant. This book brings with it a deeply, touching human side to those who suffered though the '14- ...more

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Aug 27, 2018 ALLEN rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY is not a military history, it's a cultural history of World War One from the British soldier's point of view. Fascinating, and nabbed author Fussell the National Book Award back in 1975. Still very much "recommended reading" today. With chapters like "Oh, What a Literary War" and "Soldier Boys," Fussell, an American WWII combat veteran, showed the world that there was more to the Great War than the suffering it entailed -- he maintained that the war ushered in the ...more

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Feb 01, 2009 Steve rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, lit-crit, war, lost-generation, non-fiction

One of the most important books I've ever read. ...more

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Nov 23, 2016 Paul Haspel rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: veterans-day, world-war-i

The Great War of 1914-18 was called “The War to End All Wars” – though it wasn’t, and it didn’t. What it did do, as we all know, is kill 17 million people. It also wounded 20 million more, turned large parts of Europe into a wasteland, and destabilized the continent’s governments in a manner that would encourage the rise of totalitarian regimes and the outbreak of an even bloodier Second World War. And according to Paul Fussell, the Great War did one other thing: it exerted virtually a controlli ...more

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Jan 19, 2012 Al rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Before tackling Paul Fussell's book, it's useful to understand that this is in no way a conventional history of World War I. While the events of the war are covered insightfully, the war serves as the source of Fussel's analysis of how those who wrote about the war reflected the influence of the literature of the times as well as how the Great War writers would influence those who later wrote about war such as Norman Mailer or Joseph Heller. At times it reads like someone's brilliant dissertatio ...more

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Oct 02, 2009 James Henderson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history-of-ideas, lit-criticism, military-history, history

Paul Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains in my mind as fresh and gripping today as when I read it many years ago. It is a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who most effectiv ...more

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Jul 24, 2009 Suzie Wilde rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: would-love-to-re-read

I learnt more about WW1 from this book than almost any other. Fussell charts the war's progress via language use. There was a huge shift away from the heroic, used as a tool to lure thousands to their death. For example, 'the fallen' quickly became 'the dead', 'chargers' became 'horses', clearly showing the men's utter disillusionment and contempt for euphemism. Their new way of speaking made it impossible for them to talk candidily when they returned home. It was a literal, as well as ideologic ...more

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Jun 11, 2017 Phrodrick rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The Great War, and Modern Memory is not a military history or a literary history. It draws from history and from literature mostly to help the author comprehend the experience of war. In the afterward he will describe this book as elegiac, meaning it is similar to an elegy. Elegy, meaning writing mourning the dead. It is very respectful of these many millions of dead, but this is incomplete. What Fussell does is to lead us into the special horrors that was trench warfare in WWI and try to explai ...more

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Feb 23, 2017 columbialion rated it did not like it · review of another edition

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

The title of this book should read “The Literary Testimonies of the Great War” because if you approach Fussell’s book as a source of historiography of WWI, you likewise will be disappointed. The author has successfully compiled an annotated compilation of various poems, prose and memoirs of British soldiers whom after the War published their work in England. Names such as Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, their wri ...more

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Sep 21, 2016 John rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I first read this book about thirty years ago. With the 100 anniversary of World War 1 in our midst, I thought it would be good to read again.

It is a moving, erudite, and eye-opening read regarding the Great War and its impact to what was then Victorian society. How the terrible war altered that society, changed the dynamics of how people viewed the world, and set the stage for what was a terrible century for the world.

The trench scenes are excellent. The people like Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, ...more

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Oct 23, 2014 Maxanna rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I almost never abandon a book. And I did keep slogging toward the end despite my waning interest. Now I do believe that for a certain audience this book would be a "5", but I'm not in that audience. First you need a thorough understanding of English literature, particularly poetry. I don't. Next you have to enjoy reading pages and pages of war poetry. It made me tired and though you can "speed read" prose, poetry can only be understood slowly, thoughtfully. I tried the "speed reading" approach. ...more

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Jan 07, 2015 Steve Mayer rated it did not like it

It would be wrong to say that I hated every page, because I enjoyed the exegesis of Goodbye To All That (which I read forty years ago). And the resolute Englishness of its focus was fun at first. And it is full of interesting WWI factoids, such as the fact that it was easy to send post from England to the front. But after 260 pages, I've had enough. I don't care whether yet another diarist, or poet, or novelist, contrasted the trenches to flowers, birds,grassy meadows or reindeer. Goodbye To All ...more

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About Paul Fussell

Paul Fussell

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Paul Fussell was an American cultural and literary historian, author and university professor. His writings covered a variety of topics, from scholarly works on eighteenth-century English literature to commentary on America’s class system. He was an U.S. Army Infantry officer in the European theater during World War II (103rd U.S. Infantry Division) and was awarded both the Bronze Star and the Pur ...more

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