“History belongs to an age of rationalism, to the 18th and particularly the nineteenth century. The latter century had shown great respect for its historians. The Guizots, Michelets, Rankes, Macaulays, and Actons were read and appreciated, especially by a bourgeoisie bent on expansion and integration. Our century has, by contrast, been an antihistorical age, in part because historians have failed to adapt to the sentiments of their century but even more so because this century has been one of dis-integration rather than integration. The psychologist has, as a result, been more in demand than the historian. And the artist has received more respect than either. It is noteworthy that among the mountains of writing built up on the subject of the Great War, a good many of the more satisfying attempts to deal with its meaning have come from the pens of poets, novelists, and even literary critics, and the professional historians have produced, by and large, specialized and limited accounts, most of which pale in evocative and explanatory power before those of the littérateurs. Historians have failed to find explanations to the war that correspond to the horrendous realities, to the actual experience of the war. The spate of official and unofficial histories that issued forth in the twenties was largely ignored by the public. By contrast, Remarque’s All Quiet [on the Western Front] became, virtually overnight, the best seller of all previous time.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“The initial Canadian Expeditionary force of twenty thousand [in World War I] was organized by Sam Hughes, who was, as Borden informed him, ‘beset by two unceasing enemies. Expecting a revelation, he was intensely disappointed when I told him that they were his tongue and his pen.’”

Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

“In methods, tactics, and instruments of war, Germany took the initiative in 1914. The war was to bring a revolution in the European spirit and, as a corollary, in the European state structure. Germany was the revolutionary power of Europe. Located in the centre of the continent, she set out to become the leader of Europe, the heart of Europe, as she put it. Germany not only represented the idea of revolution in this war; she backed the forces of revolution everywhere, whatever their ultimate goals. She helped Roger Casement and the Irish nationalists in their struggle against Britain, and shipped Lenin back to Russia from Switzerland to foment revolution in Petrograd. What was important above all for Germans was the overthrow of the old structures. That was the whole point of the war. Once that had been achieved, the revolutionary dynamic would proceed to erect new structures valid for the new situation.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Though we observe the higher law/ and though we have our quarrel just,/ Were I permitted to withdraw/ You wouldn’t see my arse for dust./ A soldier’s verse”

First of three header quotations in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era on Section or Chapter VII

In countries they invaded in World War I “the Germans generally insisted on the right to requisition and to demand docility from a population under occupation. They were not alone in this, but they were virtually alone in positing an extreme version of the argument – the idea of Kriegsverrat. According to this view, the disruption of the war effort by civilians in occupied territory is as treasonous as disruption by one’s own nationals. The German occupation of Belgium was consistent with this proposition, and while as a whole certainly not as monstrous as Allied propaganda made it out to be, the occupation policy was nevertheless draconic. If babies were not systematically snatched from mothers’ arms and smashed against brick walls, if nuns were not deliberately sought out for sodomy, rape, and slaughter, if old people were not made to crawl on all fours before being riddled with bullets, considerable numbers of hostages were shot, including women and children and octogenarians. Louvaine was razed, together with its library, founded in 1426, with its 280,000 volumes at its priceless collection of in incunabula and medieval manuscripts. Schrechlichkeit, or frightfulness, was pronounced official policy in the occupied areas, initially in Belgium and then in France in Russia. The term furor teutonicus was used by Germans with pride.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Germany, which had been united as recently as 1871 and within one generation had become an awesome industrial and military power, was, on the eve of war [World War I], the foremost representative of innovation and renewal. She was, among nations, the very embodiment of vitalism and technical brilliance. The war for her was to be war of liberation, a Befreiungskrieg, from the hypocrisy of bourgeois form and convenience, and Britain was to her the principal representative of the order against which she was rebelling. Britain was in fact the major conservative power of the fin-de-siècle world.”

Author’s “Preface” in Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“But what the [Christmas 1914 World War I] truce revealed, by its unofficial and spontaneous nature, was how resilient certain attitudes and values were. Despite the slaughter of the early months, it was the subsequent war that began profoundly to alter those values and to hasten and spread in the west the drift to narcissism and fantasy that had been characteristic of the avant-garde and large segments of the German population before the war.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“But perhaps the most important influence in the development of a vision of social order based on commonly accepted values was the growth of Protestantism and of Bible reading [in Britain], especially in the wake of the great revival in the early nineteenth century. By the end of that century a shared vision of social order was widely in place. This vision and its accompanying values were not imposed through social imperialism but grew out of the religious environment and, where this did not suffice, out of improved economic and social conditions. It is generally accepted that by the end of the Victorian era, most of the British population no longer had to struggle simply to subsist. A measure of comfort, however small, had been achieved in most cases. Consumption of meat instead of bread, of milk and eggs instead of just potatoes, was rising. In recent years, before the turn of the century, there had been a steady rise in real wages, a decline in family size, a drop in the consumption of alcohol, and the beginnings of social welfare provisions. Archdeacon Wilson, headmaster of Clifton College, remarked in the speech to the Working Men’s Club of St. Agnes in 1893: ‘Possibly a future historian writing the history of the English people in this period will think much less of the legislative and even of the commercial and scientific progress of the period than of the remarkable social movement by which there has been an effort made, by a thousand agencies, to bring about unity of feeling between different classes, and to wage war against conditions of life which earlier generations seem to have tolerated.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era