The Culture of Fear in World War One

In 1917 the pioneering American film director D.W. Griffith visited the Belgian town of Ypres on the Western Front to conduct research for his movie Hearts of the World after being given exceptional access to the lines by British authorities eager to harness his skills for propaganda purposes. Despite receiving license to film whatever he wished, what he found was perplexing. The battlefield was "too colossal to be dramatic," he later complained, its human figures "hidden away in ditches" leaving "literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness." "You might as well try to describe the ocean or the Milky Way," he lamented.¹ Despite being the most famous and innovative creator of war movies in the era—a reputation staked on the Civil War battle scenes in The Birth of a Nation—Griffith admitted defeat and recreated his own more camera-friendly version of the trenches on Salisbury Plain instead.

Griffith is a marginal figure in the two books discussed here, but his response to the war was indicative of a broader cultural impasse. The industrial, technological, and tactical innovations of World War One posed unprecedented challenges not just for the politicians, military commanders, and populations that prosecuted it, but also for the cultural apparatus the West had available for representing and understanding war.

Few events in history have been seen as having such an immediate and wide-ranging impact on cultural imaginaries across media and genre; there is a huge body of scholarship examining the war's impact on the modernist movement, for example, or how it transformed memorial architecture and commemorative practice. Yet the authors of these two books have traced the war's relation to another less-acknowledged twentieth-century cultural legacy, to a phenomenon often simultaneously psychological, political, and aesthetic—fear. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole suggests the Great War gave birth to modern traditions of horror, a genre that flourished after 1918 across the West in much visual and literary media; it catered to populations reeling from the events of 1914–18 through developing a set of classic iconographies and dramatic situations that powerfully evoked and channeled the embodied and psychological experiences of the conflict. Zachary Smith's more historically focused Age of Fear examines how fear of a German racial and/or religious other in the United States saturated the political rhetoric, religious ideology, and popular culture of the war, a discourse that framed conflict with Germany less as a selfless and idealist battle to make the world safe for democracy and more as an existential struggle to stave off racial annihilation. Both authors locate the extensive twentieth-century legacies of the politics of fear that developed in World War One; and while they are clear that fear does not inevitably tend in one political direction, both are forthright about its hospitability to absolutist, authoritarian governance and its centrality to some of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' darkest moments.

For Poole, what World War One munitions did to the human body (and bodies) was the source of much of the horror genre that flourished in its aftermath, especially in German expressionist cinema in the 1920s and early 30s and then in the "Universal Horror" classics of Hollywood in the 1930s. Revenant armies of the dead, monsters stitched together from multiple corpses, the animation of puppets or dolls, and monsters invading peaceable countries became widely used and popular conventions in films made or designed by men who often had first-hand experience of combat in the war. Poole assesses a diverse range of cultural material to build his argument, drawing from different national and generic traditions and across media. Anglophone poetic modernism is represented here by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the latter's long poem "The Waste Land" (full of rattling bones, sprouting corpses, and unreal burning...