Why is WWI referred to so often as “the last romantic war”?
I’ve come across this many times and have a couple of theories, but no one i know has been able to give me a reason for it. i’ve had trouble trying to find any info about it otherwise, so someone please, help!
I think this is probably due to the incredible influence the governments involved in the war were able to have over the popular culture and through their propoganda.
Creating a seductive imagery of a war of heroes and Uberschmen, of pure unadulterated goodness versus complete monstrous evil, always blinking out the massive costs to the civilian populations, etc.
World War II created some of the greatest propaganda of any major war, on all homefronts, Allied, Nazi, and Soviet.
After World War II, the popular culture was able to free themselves from so direct a governmental manipulation (this is particularly true of the later Vietnam War), so that some of the citizen body were able to discover what war had always been like, it wasn’t John Wayne, but Apocalypse Now.
That is why World War II, the worst war in human history, in which more than 80 million died, is nostalgically remembered by reinforcement from the war machine as romantic.
It may have been refered to that in the opening days of 1914 , but within a few short months ,that was majorly disabused.
Declan
Oh, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot!
I thought you said WWII…
WWI? probably because Woodrow Wilson was able to trick people into thinking it was the War to End All Wars, that humanity had finally learned, that if we all tried really hard, war could be averted after that calamity…
of course, after that we had WWII and the Holocaust,
when mostly people realized
“You know what? Screw it. Humanity is hopelessly messed up. THERE IS NO HOPE. Romanticism has no place when we describe human beings. There will always be war because Wilson was a putz, and humanity is evil. The only hope is self-extermination”
And that, my friend, is why Albert Einstein invented the A-bomb.
Because, from my reading, the Brits especially were sold on the duty, honor, country line, that it would be a quick, glorious war, which came from the Grand British Military Tradition of wars past. No specific cites, just a general impression I’ve gotten. Whereas World War I introduced the machine gun, trenches, etc., so it was no longer brave men in fancy uniforms standing bravely in lines, waiting to die.
I thought that’s why we came up with Dadaism!
It’s always about the United States, isn’t it? :rolleyes:
The pre-1914, romantic view of a war was a European construct, based on the limited European experience of warfare during the century between 1815 and 1914. Most European wars of that era had been relatively brief and bloodless affairs fought by professional armies (such as, for example, the Seven Weeks War between Austria and Prussia) or one-sided colonial wars against weaker, non-European enemies. War was considered the ideal venue for brave young men to demonstrate their patriotism and courage. The young men of Europe vied in their ardor for battle in 1914, and poets celebrated their elan and dash.
The United States did not share this view, having experienced modern “total warfare” during the American Civil War 50 years earlier. By 1918, Europe didn’t share it any more, either. Hence, the “last Romantic war”.
In addition, the Great War saw the introduction of some fundamentally new devices to European war: The Gatling gun and poison gas. Machine guns were used in the American Civil War, but not to such effect as in Verdun and similar battlefields. Poison gas, being such a fundamentally nasty way to die, itself shattered a lot of preconcieved notions about how chivalrous warfare was supposed to be.
And chivalry is what it comes down to: During the Great War, war death in Europe become impersonal. A German with a machine gun could kill a dozen doughboys he’d never see through the gloom, and a British commander loading up a mustard gas round could kill a hundred Germans that would never be able to look him in the eye. Dying toe-to-toe with your foe in `fair’ combat is one thing. Being killed by mechanical monsters is quite another.
This is a minor hijack, but this is the Straight Dope after all. Albert Einstein didn’t invent the A-bomb. If any one person can be given credit, which I don’t think is possible, that person would beLeo Szilard. Here is an excerpt from the cite:
"1933 Fled Germany March 31 to escape Nazi persecution. … Ernest Rutherford quoted in London Times on September 12 as saying “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.” While walking through the streets of central London after reading this article – as he waited for a streetlight at the corner of Southampton Row – Leo Szilard conceived the neutron chain reaction. [bold added]
“1934 On March 12, filed first British patent application on the neutron chain reaction. [bold added] Request for laboratory space at Cambridge to investigate chain reactions rejected by Ernest Rutherford. Began experiments at London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in search of a chain-reacting element, for which he suspected beryllium. Invented the Szilard-Chalmers reaction, a method for concentrating artificially produced radioactive isotopes.”
Actually Szilard’s method wouldn’t have worked because he proposed using fast neutrons. Slow neutrons are needed because of the greatly increased probablility of their capture by the nucleus. However, it got other physicists to thinking about the subject and the result was the A-bomb and nuclear power and so on.
I think this is quite telling and very true.
Impersonal combat became the way of war, I’m sure that change the way people saw war from then on.