All three of the great English memoirists of the war, Graves, Blunden, and Sassoon, confess to entertaining the idea or the image of the war's literally continuing forever. Graves recalls with accustomed jauntiness: "We held two irreconcilable beliefs: that the war would never end and that we would win it." Newly arrived in the line, Blunden recognizes that the first question put to him, "Got any peace talk?" is entirely facetious and rhetorical. From that moment, he says, "One of the first ideas that established themselves in my inquiring mind was the prevailing sense of the endlessness of the war. No one here appeared to conceive I any end of it." And the persistence of the war (at least through 1936) is the theme of one of Sassoon's recurring anxiety nightmares. He reports that he undergoes this one "every two or three months":
I The War is still going on and 1 have got to return to the Front. I complain I bitterly to myself because it hasn't stopped yet. I am worried because I can't I find my active-service kit. 1 am worried because 1 have forgotten how to be I an officer. 1 feel that I can't face it again, and sometimes I burst into tears and say "It's no good. I can't do it." But I know that I can't escape going back, and search frantically for my lost equipment.'
The poet Ivor Gurney is one in whose mind such dreams finally filled all the space. He had fought with the Gloucester Regiment, and was wounded and gassed in 1917. He died in a mental hospital in 1937, where he had continued to write "war poetry," convinced that the war was still going on. And looking back at the war from an awareness provided by fifty-two years of subsequent history, William Leonard Marshall, a young "war novelist" not born until 1944, has found it appropriate that one of his Great War characters should say, "The war'll go on forever—what's the difference?" By the end of the same novel, the continuities of modern history have brought us to Auschwitz in the forties, where the theme of infinite war is again replayed. One prisoner asks another: "When do you think the war will end?" The other shakes his head. "I don't know. . . . About 1950, I suppose—perhaps never."
The idea of endless war as an inevitable condition of modern life would seem to have become seriously available to the imagination around 1916. Events, never far behindhand in fleshing out the nightmares of imagination, obliged with the Spanish War, the Second World War, the Greek War, the Korean War, the Arab-Israeli War, and the Vietnam War. It was not long after the Second World War, says Alfred Kazin, that even most liberal intellectuals abandoned the hope that that war had really put an end to something. As he says, there were
so many uncovered horrors, so many new wars on the horizon, such a continued general ominousness, that "the war" [that is, the Second] soon became War anywhere, anytime—War that has never ended. War as the continued experience of twentieth-century man."
The 1916 image of never-ending war has about it, to be sure, a trace of the consciously whimsical and the witty hyperbolic. But there is nothing but the literal in this headline from the New York Times for September 1, 1972:
U. S. AIDES IN VIETNAM SEE AN UNENDING WAR
Thus the drift of modern history domesticates the fantastic and normalizes the unspeakable. And the catastrophe that begins it is the Great War.
~ From The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, p. 73