Remembrance is part of the landscape. Anyone who walks through northern France or Flanders will find traces of the terrible, almost unimaginable, human losses of the war, and of efforts to commemorate the fallen. War memorials dot the countryside, in cities, towns, and villages, in market squares, churchyards, schools, and obscure corners of hillsides and fields. Scattered throughout the region are larger sites of memory: the cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme.

Contemporaries knew these names and the terrible events that happened there all too well. The history of bereavement was universal history during and immediately after the Great War in France, Britain, and Germany. In the military service of these three countries alone, more than 4 million men died, or roughly one in six of those who served. This figure represents nearly half the total death toll in the then bloodiest war in history. Among the major combatants, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that every family was in mourning: most for a relative--a father, a son, a brother, a husband--others for a friend, a colleague, a lover, a companion. . . .

In the years following the war, in the face of the army of the dead, the effort to commemorate went beyond the conventional shibboleths of patriotism. Yes, these millions died for their country, but to say so was merely to begin, not to conclude, the search for the "meaning" of the unprecedented slaughter of the Great War. Even to pose that question was bound to be appallingly difficult; full of ambivalence and confusion, charged with tentativeness and more than a fragment of futility. But that search went on in all the major combatant countries from the first months of the war.

Current interpretations of the cultural history of the Great War focus on two basic components of that process of understanding. The first is encapsulated in the term "modern memory." It describes the creation of a new language of truth-telling about war in poetry, prose, and the visual arts. "Modernism," thus defined, was a cultural phenomenon, the work of elites whose legacy has touched millions. It had sources in the pre-war period, but flowered during and after the 1914-18 conflict. . . .

The second way of understanding the war entails what many modernists rejected: patriotic certainties, "high diction," incorporating euphemisms about battle, "glory," and the "hallowed dead," in sum, the sentimentality and lies of wartime propaganda. . . . [T]he power of patriotic appeals derived from the fact that they were distilled from a set of what may be called "traditional values"--classical, romantic, or religious images and ideas widely disseminated in both elite and popular culture before and during the war. It is this set of values and the languages in which they were expressed which I call the "traditional" approach to imagining war. . . .

This book tries to go beyond the cultural history of the Great War as a phase in the onward ascent of modernism. This now fashionable and widely accepted interpretation will not stand scrutiny, primarily for two reasons. First, the rupture of 1914-18 was much less complete than previous scholars have suggested. The overlap of languages and approaches between the old and the new, the "traditional" and the "modern," the conservative and the iconoclastic, was apparent both during and after the war. The ongoing dialogue and exchange among artists and their public, between those who self-consciously returned to nineteenth-century forms and themes and those who sought to supersede them, makes the history of modernism much more complicated than a simple, linear divide between "old" and "new" might suggest.

Secondly, though, the identification of the "modern" positively with abstraction, symbolic representation, and an architectural exploration of the logical foundations of art, and negatively through its opposition to figurative, representational, "illusionist," naturalistic, romantic, or descriptive styles in painting and sculpture, is so much a part of cultural history, that it is almost impious to question it. But question it we must. What is at issue is both whether such a distinction is accurate and whether it contributes to an understanding of the cultural consequences of the Great War. On both counts, I dissent from the "modernist" school. . . .

The Great War brought the search for an appropriate language of loss to the center of cultural and political life. In this search, older motifs took on new meanings and new forms. Some derived them from classical strophes. Others explicitly elaborated religious motifs, or explored romantic forms. This vigorous mining of eighteenth and nineteenth-century images and metaphors to accommodate expressions of mourning is one central reason why it is unacceptable to see the Great War as the moment when "modern memory" replaced something else, something timeworn and discredited, which (following contemporaries) I have called "tradition."

It is the fundamental argument of this book that the enduring appeal of many traditional motifs--defined as an eclectic set of classical, romantic, or religious images and ideas--is directly related to the universality of bereavement in the Europe of the Great War and its aftermath. The strength of what may be termed "traditional" forms in social and cultural life, in art, in poetry, and ritual, lay in their power to mediate bereavement. The cutting edge of "modern memory," its multi-faceted sense of dislocation, paradox, and the ironic, could express anger and despair, and did so in enduring ways; it was melancholic, but it could not heal. Traditional modes of seeing the war, while at times less challenging intellectually or philosophically, provided a way of remembering which enabled the bereaved to live with their losses, and perhaps to leave them behind. . . .

[B]y no means all of the "traditional" languages survived the 1914-18 war and its aftermath intact. Slowly but surely, expressions of patriotism, or inhumanly idealized images of combat, suffering, and death as "glory," began to fade away. It is true that, because of the 1914-18 conflict and popular understanding of its costs and uncertain outcome, the outbreak of war in 1939 was not greeted with patriotic bravado. Partly this was a result of the newsreels of the 1930s, and the knowledge, drawn from the Spanish Civil War, they spread about air raids and civilian casualties. . . . Romantic notions about war did indeed take a battering during the 1914-18 war, and some wartime and postwar literature helped to discredit them further.

Nevertheless, in 1939 war could still be justified. What had changed in Western European culture was that the days of its glorification were over. Whatever was true in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and (after June 1941) the Soviet Union, the rest of European society greeted war as the abomination that it was.

The men and women who went to war in 1939 knew more about the cruelties of modern warfare than did the generation of 1914. They enlisted or supported the men in uniform without much patriotic fanfare, in part because they felt they had no other choice. But when the time came to mourn fallen soldiers, many of the survivors tried to use the somber languages and forms which derived from the memory of the Great War. After 1945 the names of the fallen were added to communal war memorials, and in Britain it is the poetry of the 1914-18 war which is still intoned to recall the "Lost Generation" of both world conflicts.

There is a sense in which the dead of the two world wars formed one community of the fallen. But in time both the political character of the Second World War and some of its horrific consequences made it impossible for many survivors to return to the languages of mourning which grew out of the 1914-18 war when they tried to express their sense of loss after 1945. . . .