Many Ingenious Lovely Things Are Gone

 

Pop!

Remembrance Day is coming in two days. Remembrance Day, and the First World War, have always been special to me. The First World War is when the dream of inevitable progress died, when civilization lost its way. It has not recovered. 

W.B. Yeats, for me, captures it best, in his poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:

We too had many pretty toys when young: 

A law indifferent to blame or praise, 

To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong 

Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays; 

Public opinion ripening for so long 

We thought it would outlive all future days. 

O what fine thought we had because we thought 

That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, 

And a great army but a showy thing; 

What matter that no cannon had been turned 

Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king 

Thought that unless a little powder burned 

The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting 

And yet it lack all glory; and perchance 

The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

Yet by 1919 this confidence was shattered:

[We] planned to bring the world under a rule, 

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole….

Learn that we were crack−pated when we dreamed.

We, who seven years ago 

Talked of honour and of truth, 

Shriek with pleasure if we show 

The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” from the same time, covers the same ground. Hell had broken loose.

Although I never knew it personally, I yearn for the beauty and sense of honour and order of the old Austro-Hungarian culture, or the Ottoman, or the Imperial Russian, or the Britain of the huge pink maps. Of course they had their own deep flaws, but the foundation was sound. Since then we have lost our civilizational anchors and our pole star.

I gather I am not alone; this seems to be the attraction to “steampunk.” 

It might have meant something, the terrible sacrifice and the cataclysm of the First World War, if it had indeed been “the war to end all wars.” That last hope was seemingly shattered by World War II.

But perhaps, in the end, it was the war that ended wars. Since 1945, we have not had another big one. If we take the Second World War as the continuation of the first, left unfinished, after a truce of twenty years, the prolonged holocaust ended with the atom bomb. And since then, terrified as we all are of the atom bomb, it has kept us on our best behaviour. Because any war between nuclear powers would now be mutual assured destruction, nobody has since started a big, total, war, and nobody is going to start one with another nuclear power. Although there is a risk of miscalculation, if more countries had nuclear weapons, we might have fewer wars. We seem to be replacing war with technological and economic competition: first with the “space race.”

If only we could now bring back what we have lost….