Paul Fussell's THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY (1975) is not a book one can hurry though. I spent about a month on it, taking frequent breaks, because there's just so much to absorb, to learn, from this amazing volume of research, scholarship, and heartfelt commentary. Fussell came away from his own war, WWII, deeply and permanently scarred, and spent the better part of his professional life trying to understand the horror of war and the personal damage it can cause, but he was also deeply intrigued by the countless literary works that came from its participants and victims, evidenced here. He looks at not just works from the Great War, but other more recent wars too, up through Vietnam, and makes some very thoughtful and credible comparisons. Enough said; read this book. I enjoyed a brief correspondence with Paul before his death in 2012, and was deeply saddened when he left us. I will be thinking about this book, and his personal memoir, DOING BATTLE, for a long time. RIP, Paul.

- Tim Bazzett author of the memoir, SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA ( )

A challenging read, not to be taken as a straight history of the First World War but as an informative and engaging tour of the way literature and drama both informed and were informed by the war, in pursuit of the author's thesis that the predominantly ironic mode of understanding life in the twentieth century has its roots in WW1. ( )

From the WWI reading program. Author Paul Fussell points out the number of terms that became permanent parts of the language due to WWI - "in the trenches", "going over the top", "no-man's land". (I was thinking more of terms that no longer have a military meaning, or at least not a primarily military meaning. People who talk about going "over the top" nowadays no longer associate the idea with getting a burst of machine gun fire in the chest.) I can't think of anything similar from WWII; maybe "blitz"? Or the popularity of calling people you disapprove of Nazis? I wonder how many trenchcoat wearers realize the big pockets are for grenades, the d-rings are to strap equipment down, and the double flap over the front keeps your buttons from being caught when you crawl under barbed wire.

There are a lot of eerie moments - the description of the summer of 1914 being one of the best in memory provokes me a little, because for the life of me I can't remember what the summer of 2001 was like.

Fussell makes the argument - which I find possible but not fully convincing - was that the experience of WWI for the Allies prolonged the course of WWII. Supposedly, the US was so horrified of casualties that it wasted many opportunities to be aggressive, thus allowing the Nazis to do an organized retreat. He does not cite any specific example of a battle or part of the 1944-1945 campaign where a more aggressive strategy could have been used, however. Certainly, Patton's push out of the Normandy beaches and Market-Garden were aggressive to a fault; I can't think of anywhere else where a more offensive approach would have helped.

Fussell seems to be pretty much a literate liberal. One particular item of note is he is the author of the famous essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb", which got him no end of FLAK from the intelligentsia. Fussell was waiting to go in a part of Operation Olympic (so was my father, adding some personal relevance) and he recalls he first reaction to the news of Hiroshima as "I'm going to live after all". To Fussell's credit, he doesn't just express this as a personal feeling, but poses some cogent arguments against the accepted liberal doctrine about "The Bomb". For example, to the argument that the war would have been over in "a few months" even if the bomb was not used, he points out that Allied soldiers were dying at the rate of a few hundred a week even at this late point, and that several thousand Japanese soldiers and civilians were dying each week. Thus "a few months wait" might have actually cost more Japanese lives, not just Allied lives, than using the bomb.

I'm also grateful to Fussell for introducing me to the poetry of Randall Jarrell, who is the only English language WWII poet of the same stature as the WWI poets. I wonder why? Maybe some of the stuff that happened in WWII was beyond poetry. ( )

I rarely read non-fiction, but this just took my breath away. It's both a wonderful (and achingly sad) introduction to the poets and writers who emerged (or didn't) from World War I, as well as an eye-opening description of how that conflict shaped modern life. ( )

un grande libro di storia che non ha bisogno di generali, battaglie e cannoni per raccontare la fine di un epoca e l'annichilimento della generazione che l'ha vissuta combattendo nelle trincee d'europa.
Alla fine solo dalla memoria, rivissuta e ricordata, può venire, forse, la cura per un orrore che non vuole passare.
Chi ama la storia non può non leggere questo libro. ( )