9
World Wars of the Twentieth Century
Men went gladly to war in Au
gust 1914 in the more urbanized parts of Europe. Almost everyone
assumed that fighting would last only a few weeks. In anticipation of
decisive battles, martial enthusiasm bordering on madness surged
through German, French, and British public consciousness. Disillu
sion, when it came, was correspondingly profound, yet for four long,
dreary years the will to war continued to prevail even in the face of
massive casualty lists and military stalemate on the Western Front.
Reasons for such bizarre behavior can only be surmised. The cult of
heroism sustained by an educational system that emphasized patri
otism and study of the classics had something to do with what hap
pened. So did the fact that civil strife had seemed imminent within
each of the leading countries of Europe in the decade before World
War I. To have a foreigner to hate and fear relieved potential com
batants from hating and fearing neighbors closer at hand. This was
profoundly reassuring to socialists and proletarians as well as to the
propertied classes. Perhaps, too, manifold psychological adjustments
required by the shift from rural to urban patterns of life found release
in an orgy of patriotism and militarism in 1914. The fact that war en
thusiasm was far less apparent in eastern Europe supports this view,
since urbanization had affected a smaller percentage of the population
in that region, where the peasant majority still sought to follow a
traditional pattern of life. But despite such efforts at explanation^1
World War I remains more than usually difficult to understand.- Marc Ferro, La Grande Guerre (Paris, 1969), and Emmanuel Todd, Le fou et le
proletaire (Paris, 1979) address themselves to this question more imaginatively than
most. Todd suggests that the artisan and shopkeeper classes were especially under
pressure before 1914 and sublimated sexual as well as economic frustration by transfer
ring hostility to the foreign enemy.
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