The heritage of the European Enlightenment brought enormous advances in political and technological conditions for human life. Part of this was the growing scientific investigation of biological and geological conditions of the earth, and the rise of chemistry, cellular biology, and physics. The great material improvement of living conditions and the production of industrial products and commerce, led to and ever greater concentration of political and economic accumulation of power in the modern nation state. One particularly dramatic expression of such power was the expansion of European Colonialism. Clearly, the English Empire was particularly noteworthy, but virtually every European nation had significant colonial enterprises around the globe: France in Africa and Asia, the Netherlands in Asia and the Americas, Italy in Africa, Belgium in the Congo. There is a disturbing paradox in late 19th Century European culture between the material force of nation states and their control and exploitation of non-European territories. The understanding of the effects of colonialism has grown dramatically since the mid 20th Century and affects a global expectation of human identity and rights.

But within Europe itself, there was an unresolved claim to superiority among a number of different nations. The increase in industrial power was paralleled by increase in the business of armaments and military strength. While the abstract appreciation of Enlightenment ideals of reason, personhood and the application of thought to nature and societies established a public idealism about history, human nature both in social and in national expression was darker and more threatening than many theorists and politicians had any conception of. Many critics of the objective and rational claims of culture, predicted a darkness and powerful conflict within European culture: Nietzche, Ibsen, Marx. However, the Nationalist clashes and the unforeseen power of armaments took most of the world by surprise in the outbreak of what was called The Great War in August 1914.

The beginning of the war founded on petty and self-serving national claims to right was at first seen as the prelude to a period of glorious heroism and swift victory. Many documents remain of women placing flowers in the gun barrels of young men boarding trains to go off to war. Virtually every country and news outlet proclaimed that the war would be over by Christmas. The four-year ordeal of the war (1914-1918) brought a destructiveness, and a seemingly unending pattern of slaughter and loss that few could ever have foreseen. While in absolute terms of what we called The Second World War (1939-1945) was greater in human loss, the shattering effect of The Great War, produced a trauma that shook nations, societies and untold numbers of individuals.

The perfection of the machine gun and the effectiveness of barbed wire and trench warfare, led to extensive battles with previously unequaled numbers of losses. Battles like the Somme and Ypres raged for months, with the loss of millions of lives, with the practical effect of moving the line of battle only a few hundred yards one way or the other. Trench warfare became both the triumph of military technology and the despair of Enlightenment ideals.

In many ways the roots of Modernism have already exposed the richness and conflicts of technology and psyche through the arts and through new concepts of human nature. Nietzche’s attack on conventional Western morality, Van Gogh’s intense portrayal of human perception and anguish, and Freud’s postulating of the complex world of the unconscious, all provided and artistic and conceptual prelude to the apparently irrational forces unleashed by The Great War. One notable aspect of the war was that it transcended class distinctions in terms that would seem radical by modern standards. The common working man and the scholar at Oxford, the young merchant and the bus-driver, all entered in similar proportions into the armies and the battles of the war. Intellectuals and poets were as likely to be part of the battles as daily laborers and the unemployed. While the educated soldier might well have greater access to positions of command, they were at least equally susceptible to wounds and mortality as the common soldier. The great English poet, Wilfred Owen, wrote some of the most powerful anti-war poetry of all time, yet he too returned to battle a number of times and was killed just three days before the end of the war in November 1918. The vast impact of the war reached every family and every town and village in Europe. As Virginia Wolff writes in To The Lighthouse in 1927 about this period, “Every family had lost someone in the war.”

While The Great War was of such vastness that it could not be fully synthesized, the personal experience of soldiers and societies and the tyrannical influence of military technology became a part of the literal and imaginative landscape of the modern world and thus of modernism also.