Remembering the Lost Generation

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
– John McCrae, May 1915

One hundred years ago today, Great Britain entered World War I. This, as other remarkable events in 1914 are worth remembering. Not only are we still living with the repercussions of that war – like the current strife in the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine, and even Africa – we live daily with the literature that the Great War generated.

In his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque describes the soldiers in this way: “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial – I believe we are lost.” His and others’ books about the era are poetic, yet filled with yearning and loss.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were WWI vets. These two unparalleled American authors were part of the “Lost Generation” that was the result of the War to End All Wars. They were men who sensed the immense pointlessness of world politics, who were simultaneously swept up in world events. This generation of soldiers witnessed the horrors of mass warfare; the first systematized chemical weaponry, tanks, and airplanes used in battle.

Perhaps it was this time of tribulation one hundred years ago that ushered the world into a maturity for which we were not ready nor able to accept. It was certainly not the first time people had to face both violence and a reckoning of conviction, but it was the first time it was done on a global and technologically-advanced scale.

One hundred years later, we still may not know what World War I wrought in terms of geopolitics. But we can know that it did produce some of the most poignant, creative, and disturbing literature of modern time.

This was a generation that was forced to question all they had held as solid, and so even language could have lost its meaning; in this way, the Lost Generation was perhaps more cautious about the power of seemingly insignificant things like words. When a battle could be fought over mere yards for years, the color of words becomes grey. Yet these authors and those that followed have taken the tools of writing and experimented, granting the world Technicolor prose.