The Lost Generation

One hundred years ago today. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice ended fighting on the Western Front in World War I. It was called the War to End All Wars and The Great War at the time, because no one expected another war on this scale. The press gave a special title to the men who had fought the war. They are forever known as The Lost Generation.

One hundred years later, it is the slaughter in the trenches that we remember. Stories, photographs and flickering films fill our minds with machine guns and gas and explosions. Monuments and fields of crosses across Europe mark a sobering toll of soldiers from all sides. The maimed and shell shocked are no longer here to remind us of the losses. They are now names of great grandfathers and great uncles and cousins several times removed. They do not speak to us, and their anguish is not ours.

There was another loss that was tallied at the end of that war. The artists, novelists and poets called it the loss of innocence. The Lost Generation lost its belief in the better side of humanity. They marched off to war to band music, cheers and always the promise to be home by Christmas. They believed in King, Tsar, Kaiser and country. They pictured themselves telling war stories to their grandchildren, just like their grandfathers told them of the wars of Napoleon and colonialism. Innocence turns war into an adventure, and battlefield heroics into patents of nobility.

Instead of adventure the Lost Generation found deadly attrition. Instead of heroics they found industrial slaughter. The numbers became so large that the men became nameless Tommies, Ivans, Poilus and Boche. Humanity was faceless fuel into the conflagration. Bodies became an industrial commodity and war plans became profit-and-loss statements. The capitalist industrial societies fought a capitalist industrial war where the cost in humanity is still not fully known. Even the bodies of the Lost Generation are lost as many have never been found or identified.

Ironically, no great battle ended the Great War. No army was decisively beaten on the battlefield. The armies continued to fight until ordered to stop, without any great prizes being taken. The Lost generation lost the claim to victory or defeat. Victory and defeat were decided after the fighting by those who had not fought themselves. The war end celebration was a celebration of survival. However, to the maimed and shell shocked, even victory over death seemed too hollow to celebrate.

Instead of the battlefield, the Great War was won or lost at the barricade. In Petrograd, Berlin, Vienna and dozens of other cities and towns across Europe, the people revolted against their governments and demanded an end to the war. Soldiers and sailors mutinied in support of, and supported by the population. Pre-war governments collapsed and were replaced with those willing to accept peace. Civil disorder was the order of the day, and the armies left the war because society could no longer provide the men, material or morale to go on fighting.

No nation was safe from the disorder. The French army mutinied in 1917, and could not be trusted to fight an offensive war. Great Britain was facing unrest in Ireland, India and South Africa. The United States experienced waves of sabotage. All of the victorious allies experienced labor unrest and extreme morale swings at home. At the end, Communist cells began to form in all countries for the coming revolutions.  No national government had the power to continue the war, so they signed an armistice and declared the war over. A date and time was chosen, and fighting went on until the hour of eleven had struck on the eleventh of November, 1918.

Some veterans would claim later that they were “stabbed in the back” by disorder at home. Ironically, it was this very disorder that allowed them to live to complain. The Lost Generation had lost everything including self-respect. Denied a victory or a defeat, they were survivors of a slaughter rejected by their fellow citizens. They fought for monarchs and governments overthrown by the people. They came home to societies to which they could not adjust. They marched for ideals that no longer had any adherents.

One hundred years later, we live in a new Dark Age. We are still searching for the very things lost by the Lost Generation. Instead of enlightenment, what we have found are dark imitations of what has been lost. Instead of humanity we found capitalism. Instead of civilization we found industrialization. Instead of ideals we found mass media. Instead of self-respect we found hatred. We have found nothing worth fighting for and instead have spent one hundred years fighting for nothing.

We cannot save the Lost Generation. They died one hundred years ago. We are its lost descendants, and can only save ourselves and our descendants.  To do so, we must stop looking to the darkness for the enlightenment we need. We must heal our broken souls and believe in human existence. We must gather at the barricades of reason and demand the rule of compassion. We must see ourselves as worthy of respect because we allow ourselves to give that respect to others. We have to leave the trenches to meet each other as equals and not enemies.

Today I shall remember the Lost Generation. I will look at the pictures and read the story. I will see the ruins of the trenches and the cemeteries. I will look over my shoulder and see the ghosts. I will see the ghosts crossing No-Man’s-Land into destruction. I will see them asking for understanding and an end to their eternity of darkness. I will understand that the end of their darkness is in ending all that destroyed their light. I will honor their sacrifice by returning enlightenment to this Dark Age. Then the Lost Generation can at last rest in peace.

IN MEMORIAM

William Donald

19th Battalion,

Canadian Expeditionary Force

1914-1919