The Great War and Modern Memory Quotes

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer Happy those who can rely on God to see them through. They can wait patiently for the end. But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man and now see man’s image debas’d lower than the wolf or the hog— Where can we turn for consolation? Owen”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting—the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like “I have lost my left leg” or “I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover.” Because it provided no way of saying “I am going up the line again,” its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out “I am being sent down to the base,” he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being “quite” well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Henri Barbusse estimates that the French front alone contained about 6250 miles of trenches.2 Since the French occupied a little more than half the line, the total length of the numerous trenches occupied by the British must come to about 6000 miles. We thus find over 12,000 miles of trenches on the Allied side alone. When we add the trenches of the Central Powers, we arrive at a figure of about 25,000 miles, equal to a trench sufficient to circle the earth.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Great War writers did something else. They told us of the ironic nature of war, how it is always worse than we think it will be, and how it traps the soldier—no longer the hero—in a field of force of overwhelming violence, a place where his freedom of action is less than ours, where death is arbitrary and everywhere.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Bullheaded as he was, he was the perfect commander for an enterprise committed to endless abortive assaulting. Indeed, one powerful legacy of Haig’s performance is the conviction among the imaginative and intelligent today of the unredeemable defectiveness of all civil and military leaders. Haig could be said to have established the paradigm.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“I jumped into a car with orders to find out what was causing the stoppage in front.… As soon as I got near [Albert] I began to see curious sights. Strange figures, which looked very little like soldiers, and certainly showed no sign of advancing, were making their way back out of the town. There were men driving cows before them …; others who carried a hen under one arm and a box of notepaper under the other. Men carrying a bottle of wine under their arm and another one open in their hand. Men who had torn a silk drawing-room curtain from off its rods and were dragging it to the rear. … More men with writing-paper and colored note-books.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“Infinite replication and utter uniformity—those are the ideas attached to the Field Service Post Card, the first wartime printing of which, in November, 1914, was one million copies. As the first widely known example of dehumanized, automated communication, the post card popularized a mode of rhetoric indispensable to the conduct of later wars fought by great faceless conscripted armies.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“No one was to know too much. Until 1916, the parents of soldiers executed for “acts prejudicial to military discipline” were given the news straight, but after agitation by Sylvia Pankhurst, they were informed by telegram that their soldier had “died of wounds.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“war experience and its recall take the form of the deepest, most universal kind of allegory. Movement up the line, battle, and recovery become emblems of quest, death, and rebirth.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

“GROSS DICHOTOMIZING IS A PERSISTING imaginative habit of modern times, traceable, it would seem, to the actualities of the Great War. “We” are all here on this side; “the enemy” is over there. “We” are individuals with names and personal identities; “he” is a mere collective entity. We are visible; he is invisible. We are normal; he is grotesque.”
― Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory