The Generation of 1914

...The cult of the dead became a means of accounting for the disappointments of the present...

...It is true that England's junior officers did represent a social elite, and it is true also that their losses were especially horrific for their numbers...

...But are these images-all correct, and does the term "generation of 1914" mean as-much as we think it means, and does it mean it as consistently, forcefully, and helpfully as we think...

...Thus, the English generation of 1914 is the "lost" generation-"lost" in the sense of "missing," no longer there after 1918...

...invites him to do on the first page, to "close your eyes [while] a host of images leaps to mind: of students packing off to war with flowers in their rifles and patriotic songs on their lips, too young, too innocent to suspect what bloody rites of passage awaited them" and other evocative images that have become equally traditional...

...members of a generation become so through self-consciousness, through the feeling that they share something that sets them apart...

...MARK TAYLOR is chairman of the English department at Manhattan College...

...Wohl's book examines both important contributions to generational theory and the real evidence available for such theory...

...What is essential to the formation of a generational consciousness," Professor Wohl continues, "is some common frame of reference that provides a sense of rupture with the past and that will later distinguish the members of the generation from those who follow them in time...

...A social generation was the product of a spiritual transformation," is Mentre's view, and such a transformation "took place regularly within the minds and hearts of adolescents and young men...

...Wohl concludes his section on England in The Generation of 1914—a work of extraordinary research, organization, and understanding—thus: "The English generation of 1914 blamed the loss of their world on the war, but the truth was that Ithaca had begun to change long before they had embarked for Troy...

...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH...

...and yet the vast majority even of this elite survived, and by no demonstrable means its less intellectually capable members...

...For millions of Europeans born between roughly 1870 and 1900, the Great War was this common frame of reference that lent them their generational cohesiveness...

...For such historians a man's most authentic brothers are those with whom he is united, not by language, religion, ideological aspiration, or class, but by age-group...

...Elsewhere the situation was somewhat different...

...having done so, he conclude...

...BRUCE COOK, writer and critic, is a longtime contributor to Commonweal...

...Nark Taylor SOME HISTORIANS seek to clarify history by representing it as the record of struggle—between nations or ideas, for example, or social classes...

...And France was only one of the belligerents in the Great War...

...In France, for example, two years after the war ended the sociologist Francois Mentre published Les Generations Sociales, dedicated "to the new youth...

...In 1911 there were 155 males between twenty and forty per thousand of the population in England...

...blaming its loss on the illusory destruction of a generation who could not have saved it is jack CLARK, of Food Monitor magazine, is on the executive committee of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee...

...According to such a view, as Robert Wohl writes in his fascinating study The Generation of 1914, "Date of birth...

...The third group was young men born about 1900, or as little as a decade after Genevoix, who never got to serve in the war...

...they "had accepted the idea of their own death and were surprised and disoriented when the war ended . . . and they suddenly found themselves with lives to lead and careers to make in a world filled with shattered illusions...

...Still, we have the myth of a slain generation—virtually all the best men of a certain age—a myth contributed to no more by Rupert Brooke (from the beginning the very type of the brilliant and romantic idealists whom England lost) than by Wilfred Owen, whose "Anthem for Doomed Youth" remains a document in its formation...

...reluctantly that the more closely one looks at this generation, the more fragmented it becomes and the more the term "generation of 1914" tends to disappear as the significant designation of a single unit...

...The second term is as important as the first...

...The privileged world of Edwardian England was done for, war or no war, by "the broadening of access to political power, the growth of government bureaucracy and the welfare state, the emergence of organized business and labor...

...Mentre concluded, like many before him, that a generation lasts about thirty years...

...1896), who were just beginning in adult life when the war started and who "saw the war not as a sacrifice for which they had prepared but as a thunderbolt that had struck them down or an earthquake that had swept the ground from underneath them as they ventured out into adult life...

...They themselves insisted on the common identity that participation in the terrible conflict gave them, and on their difference from others, and they named themselves—so effectively that anyone reflecting for a moment on Mr...

...in 1921 there were 141...

...In their absence the old and the second-rate dithered about, allowing for another European conflagration that would transform England into an inferior nation...

...S.J., is academic dean ofRockhurst College in Kansas City...

...Wohl's purpose in writing was "to rescue the generation of 1914 from the shadowland of myth and to restore it to the realm of history...

...Wohl suggests, ironically, that however much the war poets did to invent the myth of the generation of 1914, it was largely perpetuated by the survivors, the majority who did not end up "missing.'' He argues plausibly that' 'the myth of the missing generation provided an important self-image for the survivors from within the educated elite and a psychologically satisfying and perhaps even necessary explanation of what happened to them after they returned from the war...

...There are other historians, called generationalists, who believe history can best be understood as a series of collisions between one generation and the next, or the prior, where children reject, modify, or overturn, or more rarely approve, codify, and re-energize the works of their parents...

...The second group contained slightly younger men, like Andre Breton (b...

...BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST, O.S.B., is a monk of Mount Saviour Monastery in New York, presently in residence at the Benedictine Grange in Connecticut, of which he is co-founder, brother FRANCIS v T1SO is a member of the Benedictine Grange community and an instructor in religion and philosophy at Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry...

...Each of these three positions is, moreover, a distillation of the views of a few literary intellectuals, none of whom—not all of whom—can fairly be taken as ever speaking for all of French youth...

...1873) and Maurice Genevoix (b...

...Yet Professor Wohl argues convincingly for such different emphases among Mentre's own approximate contemporaries that it is possible to differentiate easily among three groups or separate'' war generations.'' The first, Commonweal: 444 which included Henri Barbusse (b...

...1890), consisted of men who had been established when war broke out, or nearly so, and who learned "that war was hell, but...

...is destiny...

...Wohl nicely summarizes, has persisted remarkably: though England lost fewer men both absolutely and proportionately than France or Germany, it lost the best and the brightest, those young members of the governing class fresh from Oxford, Cambridge, and the public schools, who had they not been slain, would have gone on to rule and maintain the Empire...

...Commonweal: 446...

...The English myth of the Great War, which Mr...

...Wohl's title will know exactly who is meant and might go on, as Mr...

...The truest community to which one can belong is that defined by age and experience...

...1 August 1980: 445 a sentimental excuse for impotency by those who are unadaptable...

...considered this war just'' action against "the intolerable German menace...