Generals Die in Bed: Modern Warfare and the Origins of Modernist Culture

Generals Die in Bed: Modern Warfare and the Origins ofModernist Culture GORDON MARTEL I cannot formulate my hatred of these people. My head is fuzzy but I feel that people should not be sitting laughing at jokes about plum and apple jam when boys are dying out in France. They sit here in stiff shirts, their faces and jowls are smooth with daily shaving and dainty cosmetics, their bellies are full, and out there we are being eaten by lice, we are sitting trembling in shivering dugouts. Charles Yale Harrison, Generals Die in Bed Those of us who, in 1981, contemplate the possibility of war in the contemporary world are struck by two contrasting images. In the first, war is set in some exotic surrounding: the lush jungles of Cambodia, the barren mountains of Afghanistan , the burning deserts of Morocco or the Sudan. The cultural gap between these societies of tribesmen and peasants and our own highly industrialized states in the west seems immense. Their wars drag on slowly to an indefinite conclusion, affording us little knowledge of ourselves; their only meaning seems to be a warning that we should remain aloof from them. On the other hand we are haunted by the nightmare image of sudden and complete annihilation. The next war will be over before we know it. Huge craters will be found where great cities once stood. Our last moments will be spent in our offices, in our cars or in front of our television sets. We will have no time to contemplate war's meaning, only time for a moment's reflection, a silent prayer,...then infinity. But the'war people get is seldom the war they have paid for. Perhaps it will be no different in our own time; perhaps we too shall have time to consider war's meaning, to understand why it turned out to be so different from what we expected . Few of those who participated in the 2 Great War of this century expected what they got. And it was this huge gulf between expectation and reality that created the first of the enduring mysteries of the meaning of modern war. * * * Few wars have met with a response more enthusiastic than that which greeted the one that broke out in August 1914. The streets of all the major cities of all the combatant nations, including Canada, filled with people who were infused with the spirit of festival. Young men everywhere rushed to enlist; no recruiting campaigns were necessary; indeed officials could hardly keep up with the queues that formed outside their offices. The crowds on London [Ontario] streets cheered when war between Germany and Great Britain was definitely announced. Suspense and pent-up excitement , generated by the developments of the day, found expression in a yell when the bulletins told at last that the empire was at war....At 10:40 enthusiasts started a procession on Richmond Street, with four Union Jacks and a trombone player from the Seventh Regiment Band as a basis, and it soon became a big parade , shouting and singing down the streets. I In Britain, two million men enlisted in the first six months of the war. The achievement was particularly remarkable considering the contempt in which the army was held by the working class, who viewed it as a last resort because it meant exile from home, low company, drunkenness, and giving up the idea of marriage. "Pals" units were formed by football teams, church groups, towns and villages. The units were officered by young gentlemen from public schools, drawn mainly from half a dozen major cities, and from the south and west of England. So units of Clydeside riveters and Durham miners were led by young men from London, Surrey and Sussex. They discovered that they could barely understand one another.2 This merging of the classes to do battle against the enemy was one of the great attractions of the war, especially for the young men of the middle class. Reared in safe, cozy and comfortable surroundings , trained by their families to aim for Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 16, Nos. 3&4(Automne-Hiver1981 Fall-Winter) ever-increasing material achievements, the young greeted the...