The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,150

justified.”131 It was not just that Europe was reeling from the loss of lives and resources. As Mueller notes, there had been comparably destructive wars in European history before, and in many cases countries dusted themselves off and, as if having learned nothing, promptly jumped into a new one. Recall that the statistics of deadly quarrels show no signature of war-weariness. Mueller argues that the crucial difference this time was that an articulate antiwar movement had been lurking in the background and could now say “I told you so.”

The change could be seen both in the political leadership and in the culture at large. When the destructiveness of the Great War became apparent, it was reframed as “the war to end all wars,” and once it was over, world leaders tried to legislate the hope into reality by formally renouncing war and setting up a League of Nations to prevent it. However pathetic these measures may seem in hindsight, at the time they were a radical break from centuries in which war had been regarded as glorious, heroic, honorable, or in the famous words of the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, “merely the continuation of policy by other means.”

World War I has also been called the first “literary war.” By the late 1920s, a genre of bitter reflections was making the tragedy and futility of the war common knowledge. Among the great works of the era are the poems and memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, the bestselling novel and popular film All Quiet on the Western Front, T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End, King Vidor’s film The Big Parade, and Jean Renoir’s film Grand Illusion—the title adapted from Angell’s pamphlet. Like other humanizing works of art, these stories created an illusion of first-person immediacy, encouraging their audiences to empathize with the suffering of others. In an unforgettable scene from All Quiet on the Western Front, a young German soldier examines the body of a Frenchman he has just killed:No doubt his wife still thinks of him; she does not know what happened. He looks as if he would have often written to her—she will still be getting mail from him—Tomorrow, in a week’s time—perhaps even a stray letter a month hence. She will read it, and in it he will be speaking to her....

I speak to him and say to him: “. . . Forgive me, comrade.... Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony?” . . .

“I will write to your wife,” I say hastily to the dead man. . . . “I will tell her everything I have told you, she shall not suffer, I will help her, and your parents too, and your child—” Irresolutely I take the wallet in my hand. It slips out of my hand and falls open.... There are portraits of a woman and a little girl, small amateur photographs taken against an ivy-clad wall. Along with them are letters.132

Another soldier asks how wars get started and is told, “Mostly by one country badly offending another.” The soldier replies, “A country? I don’t follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.”133 The upshot of this literature, Mueller notes, was that war was no longer seen as glorious, heroic, holy, thrilling, manly, or cleansing. It was now immoral, repulsive, uncivilized, futile, stupid, wasteful, and cruel.

And perhaps just as important, absurd. The immediate cause of World War I had been a showdown over honor. The leaders of Austria-Hungary had issued a humiliating ultimatum to Serbia demanding that it apologize for the assassination of the archduke and crack down on domestic nationalist movements to their satisfaction. Russia took offense on behalf of its fellow Slavs, Germany took offense at Russia’s offense on behalf of its fellow German speakers, and as Britain and France joined in, a contest of face, humiliation, shame, stature, and credibility escalated out of control. A fear of being “reduced to a second-rate power” sent them hurtling toward each other in a dreadful game of chicken.

Contests of honor, of course, had been setting off wars in Europe throughout its bloody history. But honor, as Falstaff noted, is just a word—a social