In many respects, WWI is the defining moment in modern Western history. As the 19th century ended, incipient tensions had come to the fore, casting cautionary shadows over a new century’s overweening confidence and sense of optimism.
The technological progress of the era had been extraordinary. Science and industry were ascendent. Yet economic disparities grew, industrial workers were exploited, and the fabric of traditional society began to fray. Many felt uncertain, adrift, vulnerable.
Thus, when war came, some saw it as a referendum on Western Civilization itself. For a new challenge had arisen, one that had effectively questioned the supremacy of settled tradition. German Idealism, that is, promised a new man and a new future, mercifully detached from the past and its myriad sins and imperfections.
Nonetheless, the Allies assumed the Great War would end quickly, cementing the West’s noblest ideals. Yet as their righteous venture devolved into pitiless trench warfare, such eternal verities appeared all but quaint amid the cruel and impersonal technologies of modern warfare. Frankenstein had been unleashed.
In the war’s aftermath, Europe was dispirited, having lost thousands of its young men, the next generation. Confidence in the past had ebbed. So, too, the future. Everything seemed up for grabs. European civilization had foundered on quicksand.
It was Gertrude Stein who labeled the young survivors, both men and women, the “lost generation.” Theirs was a life of uncertainty and anomie. Though others took a different tact.
Christian author, Ephraim Radnor, in a poignant essay entitled, “Down to Earth,” offers British writer and activist, Vera Brittain, as an alternative to Stein. Her memoir, published in 1933, Testament to Youth, contains her studied thoughts on the subject.
Brittain had faced great personal hardship. Her fiancé, along with several of his close circle of friends, had been killed in the fight. So, too, her younger brother, “whose haunted and perseverant soldiering and death at the very end of the war” proved “the last of the savage destructions of all her closest loves,” as Radnor puts it.
One of the first women to study at Oxford, she left the university and volunteered as a nurse. She worked in the “wretched military wards” of London, Malta (surviving the sinking of the enormous hospital ship Britannic on the way), and the Western front. She had seen “everything” the war had thrown up against humanity.
In her memoir she labels her generation not as “lost,” but simply as the “war generation.” Rather than succumb to despair and disillusionment, she attempted to channel her sorrows into rebuilding the human community.
“Her generation needed to change everything;” writes Radnor, “faithfulness to her generation’s task demanded that everything become her responsibility.” Which is to say, she became consumed with working toward peace, working for the day when war would simply be no more.
Those efforts led to an unyielding commitment to a form of Christian pacificism, even after, years later, Hitler not only threatened but made good on his threats of war.
Even then, she advanced the idea of “humiliation” as the ground of “inward redemption.” As nations were intrinsically perverted entities, only by their failure and dissolution would a large space open up for individual flourishing.
Radnor writes: “There is a deep pathos expressed as Brittain recounts to her son the horrendous carnage and destruction war had brought, in her own life and that of so many others. Her pacifist vision is one that must lift itself above the earth and its losses, all piling up in mounds of sorrow. By leaving war behind, the war generation, in Brittain’s vision, would leave behind “the trackless wastes of the war-scarred world itself.”
In her obsessive, headlong pursuit of the ideal, in other words, she refused the simple verities of incarnational life, of life lived, that is, in this exquisite, heartbreaking, and God-haunted world.
Radnor, by way of contrast, points out that Hemingway begins his first novel with Stein’s adage about the “lost generation” yet entitles his novel The Sun Also Rises, taken from Ecclesiastes:
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever…The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose…
“Generations rise and fall,” writes Radnor, “for the reason the sun also rises: because ‘the earth abideth’ still. The world continues and our place within it carries on, whatever blows we suffer.”
“Against our modern tendency,” he continues, “to imagine that we are in some way facing unprecedented circumstances, whether of untold promise or of unbearable grief, Ecclesiastes draws our attention to ‘ongoing-ness.’”
Radnor points out that though our Christian faith rightly locates our truest home as with God and this world as of qualified standing (that shall “pass away”), we nonetheless have the Old Testament witness to ground us in the here and now, to remind us that the “earth abideth” even “in the face of our fatigue and disillusion.”
Again, Radnor: “The ‘elements’ of both heaven and earth will one day ‘melt in the heat’ of God’s unraveling of the present age (2 Peter 3:12), but in the meantime, creation’s ongoing-ness is a grace given by God for human repentance (1 Peter 3:9).
“As we turn to our worldly and created vocations, season after season, we turn to God, who season by season warms and cools the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). This last verse is, in fact, the premise upon which the love of enemy is founded.”
To emphasize the point, Radnor lifts up the work of Clare Leighton, the sister of Vera Brittain’s deceased fiancé who emigrated to the United States in 1939. A writer and artist, she is best known for her remarkable wood engravings, one of which is featured at the top of the page.
Many of her images are devoted to “the earth and its tending.” As Radnor puts it, “[Leighton’s] prints…record much more than rural scenes: African-American gospel singing, women and men at work in factories and by the roads, the building of ships and raising of houses, families gathered.” (As well as clam diggers on Cape Cod.)
Radnor’s closing words aptly express his measured, “down to earth” refrain. Among those of her generation, Leighton chose not bitterness or fantasy, but the often unremarkable benefactions of incarnational life.
“She, too,” Radnor concludes, “survived the war.”