The Impact of the War 925

A widow in mourning before her husband’s grave at the

end of World War I.

cost, coining up with a figure of $338 billion dollars after establishing a
rough value for property and even lives lost.
No one could begin to measure other dimensions of the wars impact.
The psychological damage to the generation of survivors can hardly be
measured. “Never such innocence again,” observed the British writer Philip
Larkin, referring to the period before the war. The post-war period, rampant
with hard times and disappointments, caused many people to look back even
more on the pre-war period as the “Belle Epoque,” the good old days.
Woodrow Wilson was not alone in thinking that the Great War was the
war to end all wars. Many people reasoned that no one could ever again
wish such a catastrophe on humanity. The American writer F. Scott
Fitzgerald took a friend to a battlefield in the north of France: “See that lit­
tle stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month
to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and push­
ing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a
few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rags. No European
will ever do that again in this generation.” He was wrong.