post-war mindset
WHY EVEREST BECAME SO IMPORTANT
Douglas Haig – horses and bayonets most important – didn’t believe in machine guns – and loaded soldiers down w wire cutters etc. – they had to walk, not run – the Germans were shocked watching the Brits walk towards them – one said “if only they had run, they might have overwhelmed us” – Germans sprayed them down w machine guns. Haig never went near the front lines – dressed for show. And never visited the wounded. Said things like “have you really lost half a million men?”
The separation grows for those who fought and those who stayed at home: For the families at home had no idea what youth had endured. The temptation was to scream. Soldiers would go on leave only to return home to a normal life – dining at Claridges on the way to the theatre. But how could they mentally return to life as if nothing at happened?
Just 60 miles from the trenches were the comforts of England. Ypres to London was just 130 miles away. As Paul Fussell called it “the ridiculous proximity of the Front.”
When workers in munitions factories at home would go on strike – living cloistered lives at home while the soldiers fought and died for one shilling a day. But the rhetoric back home – the patriotic banter the illusion of normalcy clung to so desperately by mothers and fathers and wives who saw the stranger in a soldier’s eye left the men hollow and often angry.
AR Buchanan wrote: while some patriots went to the battle front and died for their country… Others stayed home and lied for it.
Nearly 1 million dead in Britain alone. 2.5 mill wounded 40000 amputees 60000 without sight. 2.4 mill on disability a decade after the end, including 65000 men who never recovered from the mental ravages of shell shock.
After war soldiers wanted to go anywhere but home. Home was just a reminder of lost youth and lies.
After war – came the challenge of peace. On paper Britain emerged supreme, cities and fields unscathed, her navy unchallenged, her armies triumphant, her enemies vanquished. In reality, the war left the nation bitterly divided, spiritually exhausted and financially ruined. Gold reserves had been drained – national debt surpassed gross national product. Inflation and unemployment reached levels not seen in a century. Taxes and death duties alone provoked economic agonies. By 1922 there would be 2 mill unemployed and half mill veterans living on the streets – going door to door seeking help begging for clothes and food.
War induced a sense of isolation loss of center and restless desire to move.
Stephen spender wrote: “the war had knocked the ball-room floor from under middle-class English life… People resembled dancers suspended in mid-air yet miraculously able to pretend that they were still dancing”.
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer earth concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once her flower to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
The Soldier
Rupert Brooke
1915