Thoughts of war throughout history and in many civilizations have revolved around two contradictory, though not perforce mutually exclusive, sets of images. The first postulated war as an elevating, heroic experience. The second described war as a site of destruction and desolation. This polarity between the portrayal of war as an occasion for humanity to express its nobility and its perception as providing the opportunity for human savagery is thus deeply embedded in culture and civilization.
During the last two centuries, however, major transformations in demographic patterns and social organization, in politics and industry, and in science and technology have had an immense impact on the practice and theory of war, as well as on its imagery and mythology. The availability of unprecedented quantities of ever more effective weapons, along with seemingly unlimited and increasingly pliable human reserves, and the growing capacity to mobilize these resources by the modern industrialized nation-state, greatly enhanced war’s destructive potential. This was a prospect both terrifying and exhilarating, repulsive and fascinating. It has evoked the wildest fantasies and the most nightmarish visions. Characteristically for an age of rapid changes, the reality of total war and genocide consistently remained one step ahead of its image. Ours is a century in which man’s imagination has been conducting a desperate race with the practice of humanity. And precisely because the mind could no longer catch up with man-made reality, it conjured up visions of the future that surpassed all known forms and dimensions of destruction and thereby created the preconditions for even greater suffering, pain, and depravity.
What is most crucial about Europe’s first industrial war in 1914—18 is not the enthusiasm with which its outbreak was greeted in the major combatant nations. To be sure, even if the extent of what has come to be called “the spirit of 1914” has been somewhat exaggerated, one cannot ignore the fact that youthful volunteerism, mass industrial mobilization, intellectual and academic propagandistic engagement, and political consensus all combined to provide the early phases of the war with a bizarre mixture of anxiety and elation, a festive atmosphere permeated with premonitions of disaster. However much disillusionment was to set in during the latter parts of the war, this was still an extraordinary expression of devotion not merely to the nation but also to the notion of war itself as a noble, purifying, and elevating experience. Yet in some ways, this early phenomenon harks back to the past; what makes World War I into the true baptism by fire of the twentieth century is not the high spirits of 1914 but the grim reality that followed.
If World War I is remembered primarily for the continuous front of trenches that stretched all the way from the Swiss border to the Atlantic, another crucial factor of the fighting was, in fact, the growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction. Civilians had been the main victims of war often in the past, but none of the great cataclysms of destruction in previous centuries could compare in sheer scale and lasting impact to 1914—18. For while vast numbers of men were transformed into soldiers, all other civilians became exposed to the human, economic, and psychological cost of total war. The war invaded the most remote corners of the land, and the huge conscript armies at the front contained members of every social stratum and region of the country. This was truly a war of nations, and for this reason none of the major participants was spared its consequences.