In his 1989 book, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Canadian author Modris Eksteins characterizes the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 as the metaphorical last stand of the West, perhaps even its apotheosis. What was to follow unleashed sweeping changes that would define the 20th century.
The Great War had broken out in August of 1914 and by December a wholly new and monstrous form of warfare had developed along the entirety of the Western Front. As the first truly modern war, and thus the first to employ advanced technology (most especially machine guns and heavy artillery), the loss of life on both sides was unprecedented. It resulted not in quick advances, as both sides had reason to expect, but a long, grisly standoff.
Reportedly, at certain points along the front, enemy combatants were as close as 70 feet away, holed up for days and months in makeshift trenches. Facing heavy losses, fatigue, insufficient supplies, rats, and the unusually heavy and sustained rains of fall and early winter, the soldiers’ constant companion was death and mud.
Yet, as we know, on Christmas Eve of that year a remarkable event took place. In various places along the Western Front, these bitterest of enemies laid down their arms and celebrated Christmas together. They sang songs and carols, erected Christmas trees, shared supplies and, according to some reports, even played pickup soccer matches!
This could not have happened, argues Eksteins, if not for the “bourgeois” values, history, and traditions the combatants brought with them into war. Such values, however, were soon to be replaced by other far less civilized ones as the war pitilessly dragged on. Never would anything even remotely resembling this truce ever occur again.
For one, Eksteins explains, “The Germans had been, even before the war, the most readily inclined of the leading nations to question the norms and values of nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois society, to elevate the moment beyond the grasp of the law, and to look to the dynamics of immediate experience, as opposed to those of tradition and history, for inspiration.”
Germany had been the country “most willing to question western social, cultural, and political norms before the war, most willing to promote the breakdown of old certainties and the advent of new possibilities.”
Before it unified in 1871, Germany had existed as a loose confederation of city-states. It’s important to note, says Eksteins, that unification occurred precisely as the disruptions and dislocations of the industrial revolution were at their peak.
Having no real shared sense of place or tradition, and swept up in the dizzying, disorienting changes wrought by industrialization, Germany, for all intents and purposes, was founded on the “new,” on the emerging values born of modernism.
In fact, one of the main reasons for Germany’s aggression and belligerence was its steadfast belief that any notions of reason, tradition, and values embodied by, say, Britain and France were merely noble-sounding, hypocritical lies intended to mask their rank immorality, the means of fortifying their hold on raw, naked power, and thus preventing genuine “progress.”
Only by destroying such bourgeois conventions would Germany lead the world in discovering “honest” and “authentic” truth. The death and destruction of the old order was necessary to recreate and restore the world, to forge a new transcendent reality.
In short, unlike Britain or France, Germany’s sense of self was based not on settled values born of time and place, but on an ever-evolving and abstract “ideal” or “spirit.” The past was irrelevant and, in fact, the source of all human evil. Aspiration directed toward the future alone held promise.
It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that Germany was the first to introduce new methods of warfare, ones civilized nations historically considered repugnant. These included “total warfare” (where the distinction between combatant and civilian disappears), the use of deadly gases, as well as stealth submarine strikes (the element of surprise having previously been considered ungentlemanly and barbaric).
Along with these changes, and as the death tolls mounted, especially in places like Verdun, the Sommes, and Saint Ypres, a new sensibility began to replace the old.
No longer were soldiers as apt to rely on lofty, traditional sentiments regarding the war and its purposes. In this new and brutal war of stalemate and attrition, necessity demanded a more immediate focus on existential survival, of just getting through the day amid the ghastly wastelands of France.
Superseding the prewar sentiments of honor, sacrifice, and duty, the 1920s produced a new “literature of disenchantment,” one that would “express the emerging sense of irony, disillusionment, and alienation among the front soldiers.”
Modernism was taking hold. Old verities were on the ropes, replaced by the ever-emergent “now.” Liberation from time-honored truths summoned an open-ended, timeless future. There was no going back. Western Civilization had proved insufficient; its exhaustion palpable if not inevitable.
In the end, the Germans, though they had lost the war on the battlefield, had won the war of cultures. The brave new world was upon us.
But, of course, the Germanification of the West was not yet complete. After the war, the United States, though it surely suffered a blow to its erstwhile innocence, continued to be defined by religion (mostly Protestant) and a sense of American “exceptionalism.” (By exceptionalism I mean the Constitutional order of a government and a people.)
This is one of the errors some immigrant refugees made after arriving in America during the interwar period, especially in the 1930s during the hellish rise of Nazism. The “Frankfurt School,” set up on New York’s Morningside Heights and affiliated with Columbia University, was made up of some of Germany’s leading intellectuals.
Mostly Jews fleeing the virulent anti-Semitism of Europe, in general, and Germany, in particular, they brought their wholly justified sense of alienation and fear of totalitarianism with them. The problem is that they projected it onto an America that really didn’t fit the description. They had some influence on the wider culture, particularly in academic circles, but their way of thinking wasn’t really attuned to the core of American life, until, that is, the 1960s.
In a recent article by Christopher Roach entitled, George H.W. Bush, the Last WASP President, the author pays homage not only to the late president but to the era he and his generation embodied.
He agrees with historian and biographer, Richard Brookhiser, on what defined the WASP sensibility that informed Bush’s generation. It was not so much an ethnic designation as a disposition of mind and character. Brookhiser names four closely related values in his “the way of the WASP”: conscience, civic-mindedness, industry, and anti-sensuality.
Roach writes: “The most important in Brookhiser’s telling was conscience, ‘the great legacy of Protestantism.’ Conscience means not self-expression, but rather a commitment to doing the right thing, even when it is difficult, unpopular, or unpleasant.
“Civic-mindedness is the ‘operation of conscience in social relations.’ As the late Lawrence Auster put the matter, civic-mindedness means that ‘honor, family, [and] group take a back seat to the good of society.’
“Anti-sensuality was a counsel of self-restraint, which we see demonstrated by wealthy WASPs riding around in 20-year-old Buicks and, more relevantly, through the intact families and high-trust communities that once characterized America.”
These sound conspicuously a lot like pre-WWI values, the ones that had once prevailed in Europe for centuries.
Above is a picture of Sen. Robert Dole taken at G.H.W.B.’s wake at the Rotunda in Washington, D.C. Often bitter political enemies during the 80’s and 90’s, Dole, who was severely wounded in WWII, leaving lasting physical disabilities, and now confined to a wheelchair, attempts to stand with the help of an aide to honor his lost comrade.
If you’ve seen the video footage, it’s clear he’s not physically strong enough to get up and salute the casket. Yet by sheer determination we watch as he somehow manages the impossible. He stands for just a few seconds before falling back into his chair.
This is the essence of a lost tradition that nobly admits to honor, sacrifice, and duty. He does what is right, disregarding any handicap or personal consideration. He does what is right in the sight of all.
In our post-60’s, post-Modern, post-Christian world, such actions seem archaic. They reflect allegiance to a set of definable moral and social traditions, ones our culture today so blithely and carelessly dismisses. The picture poignantly captures the end of an era.
Will these ancient codes of honor, sacrifice, and duty ever return to America? Perhaps. Only God knows.