h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have a strange fascination with the first world war. It seems to me that WW1 changed the way that we think, it changed our values. It changed Britain, and probably the world into a country with modern values.

Many history books tell you want happened, but what's much harder to work out is how it changed how people thought and felt. You need to turn to literature for that, to poetry and to first person accounts. Through literature you can get the way people thought, their value systems and the way that the felt. I've been fascinated with WWI ever since I read a book at school when I was about 10 about the life of a village boy who joined the army at the age of 14 after lying about this age. It was a really chap fictionalised account, designed to educate children, it wasn't accurate. But it was interesting, because there was no way that the 14 year olds I knew would ever join the army when their was a risk of being killed.

War poetry taught me more about how people thought, about the jingoistic belief that war would be a good thing, something that seems so alien now. Then within a few years we had Dulce et Decorum Pro Patra Morte and the rest of the works of Wilfred Own.

The class system died in the trenches of WW1, as did respect for authority, and a value system where you were taught to put your institution, and your country before yourself. Cynicism, and thinking for yourself seemed to have been first become widespread in the trenches.

Have you read Vera Britain's 'Testament of Youth'? If not, put it on your list. It's one of those books I'll recommend to anyone who'll listen. (Lurkers - this means you too.) It catches the end of one world and the first stumbling steps of a new world with none of the old certainties.

Double T in 'Brittain'. Perview is my fiend.

Thanks, I'm just checking to see if it's available on my Kindle..

I second Ivan. 'Testament of Youth' is excellent, and fascinating, and so damn sad.

Maybe because the war was fought over there Europe changed their thinking first. Here is the US I think it took Pearl Harbor (1941) before we got into that mindset.

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Then there was Vietnam- the first war that the US can say it lost.
And finally 11 September 2001. We really modernized our values after that event.

I wonder if someone is being pre-moderated.

Something I was reading recently - in a context completely unrelated to Armistice Day - illustrated just what you're talking about, Z, in terms of that war being a massive breach with the pre-war society. It dealt with France, specifically, but the stats speak for themselves:

- over 60% of the men born before 1901 fought in the war

- of 38,000 communes that made up France, only one had nobody killed in the war

- of the 7.5 million who fought, 1.5 million died and 6 million survived. 3 million of the survivors were wounded or disabled.

Now, that's just for France, but any one of those figures gives pause for thought. (And, incidentally, it also shows why I don't have a lot of time for all those childish jokes about French cowardice made by people who will hopefully never know anything like that.)

If any of you happen to visit Egypt, I recomment a trip to El Alamein. Watching over thousands and thousands of graves of soldiers killed in WW1 made a deep impression on me.

*recommend

And it was so sad to see that most of the soldiers were in their very early twenties, if even that, and many of them left a wife and sometimes children behind.

Thank you for recommending Vera Britten, I acquired it on my Kindle yesterday and it's excellent.