The Age of Illusion [antikvár]

Chapter One A Great Day for Westminster Abbey It has become the custom to say that the old world died when the shots were fired in Sarajevo, but a world doesn't die as easily as all that. Certainly it doesn't collapse and vanish with the neat poignancy of a murdered archduke. All that is certain is that the bullet which entered Franz Ferdinand's throat ricocheted on for thirty-seven days like a comet to announce the end of the cosmos. Engineering the actual destruction of the cosmos, however, was a very different matter. It required the apprentice virtues of perseverance and blind devotion, and it got them. The lights went out all over Europe and in the fifty-one months of darkness which followed the heirs of the West were marched, like the Tollund man, to a vast quagmire on the Belgian border and suffocated. Altogether, eight and a half millions were slaughtered and twenty-one millions were hurt. It was a world which ended with a bang and without a whimper. In what Wilfred Owen called 'carnage incomparable and human squander' encumbered with a morality which no longer worked but which, like Christian's load, couldn't be jettisoned, and with a fine naive patriotism, an immense company of the young was immolated in the dark arterial trenches. No more innocent generation was ever destroyed so ignorantly or so thoroughly. The particulars of its destruction were disgusting and were bowdlerized by the official obituarists. They had to be; the truth was obscene. A popular print which found its way into thousands of British homes showed a handsome Tommy sprawling at the foot of the Cross. It was called 'The Great Sacrifice' and it invited comparison. Neither body of God nor man exhibited outrage or indecency, and so it was with all the official written and spoken references to what was happening. Sons and lovers simply 'fell' like cut flowers and the tireless scything of young life went on.