Aug 1914 – Thoughts for Today

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (1943)

“What did the great mass know of war in 1914, after nearly half a century of peace? They did not know war, they had hardly given it a thought. It had become legendary, and distance had made it seem romantic and heroic. They still saw it in the perspective of their school readers and of paintings in the museums; brilliant cavalry attacks in glittering uniforms, the fatal shot always straight through the heart, the entire campaign a resounding march of victory. “We’ll be home for Christmas!” the recruits shouted laughingly to their mothers in August of 1914. Who in the villages and the cities of Austria remembered ‘real’ war? A few ancients at best, who in 1866 had fought against Prussia, which was now their ally. But what a quick, bloodless, far-off war that had been, a campaign that had ended in three weeks with few victims. A rapid excursion into the romantic, a wild, manly adventure — that is how the war of 1914 was painted in the imagination of the simple man. And the young people were honestly afraid that they might miss this most wonderful and exciting experience of their lives. That is why they hurried and thronged to the colors. And that is why they shouted and sang in the trains that carried them to the slaughter. Wildly and feverishly the red wave of blood coursed through the veins of the entire nation. But the generation of 1939 knew war. It no longer deceived itself. It knew that it would last for years and years, an irretrievable span of time. It knew that men did not storm the enemy, decorated with oak leaves and ribbons, but hung about for weeks at a time in trenches or quarters covered in vermin and mad with thirst and that men were crushed and mutilated from afar without ever coming face to face with the foe. 

The newspapers and cinemas had already made the new devilish techniques of destruction familiar: people knew how the giant tanks ground the wounded under their treads and how airplanes destroyed women and children in their beds. They knew that a World War of 1939, because of its soulless mechanization would be a thousand times more cruel, more bestial, more inhuman than all of the former wars of mankind. Not a single individual of the generation of 1939 believed any longer in a God-decreed justice of war. And what was worse, they no longer believed in the justice and permanence of the peace it was to achieve. For they remembered all too well the disappointments that the last war had brought; impoverishment instead of riches, bitterness instead of contentment, famine, inflation, revolts, the loss of civil rights, enslavement by the State, nerve-destroying uncertainty, distrust of each against all.

That is what made the difference. The war of 1939 had a spiritual meaning, a question of freedom and the preservation of moral possessions, and to fight for an idea makes man hard and determined.