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could have been so easily forgotten, that their
     experience could have left its imprint on the earth itself but no trace in our minds. Or almost none. Familiar expressions
     coined at the time popped out at me—"over the top,""nothing to write home about"—and half-remembered, perhaps half-suspected,
     snatches of poetry rose up from the pages of anthologies. The sensibility seemed excruciatingly immediate, as mordant and
     disillusioned and undated as the latest world-weary wisecrack currently exchanged on-line by ponytail capitalists and their
     slacker offspring. The famous opening to Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "UAdieu du Cavalier" ("The Cavalier's Farewell") speaks for a generation made sardonic by its experience in hell:
    Ah Dieul que la guerre est jolie
    Avec ses chants ses longs loisirs
    (Oh God! what a lovely war
    With its songs its long idle hours)
    The sarcasm sounds newly minted. Less well known, but just as sadly universal, are the great poet's entreaties as he lay on
     his deathbed, fatally weakened by war wounds, in 1918: "Save me, doctor! I want to live! I still have so much to say!"Apollinaire,
     to choose but him as an example, had stepped out of the cobwebs of a forgotten college curriculum and become an immediate
     presence for me. In glimpsing the Front, even more than a lifetime after the war had taken place, I opened the door to a haunted
     house full of invisible acquaintances.
    Then there was, as I learned from perusing some of the excellent World War I histories published in the past twenty years
     or so, what can be called the Importance of the War. Had I read them before going on that winter weekend hike, I might not
     have tread so lightly around the Somme, content just to marvel like some idiot surveyor at the physical traces the conflict
     had left. The Great War is a great divide, as well defined a boundary as the Western Front was on my friend's shaded map.
     First, but not foremost, were the political changes it helped engender. Even an incomplete list of them goes on and on: the
     fall of the Romanovs, the fall of the Ottomans, the fall of the Hohenzollerns, the fall of the Hapsburgs, the rise of Soviet
     Communism, the dress rehearsal of American hegemony, the dismemberment of Austro-Hungary, the creation of Poland, the creation
     of Yugoslavia, the creation of Czechoslovakia, the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France, the birth of nationalism in Australia,
     the birth of nationalism in New Zealand, the birth of nationalism in Canada, the revolt, independence, and partition of Ireland,
     the guarantee of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, the creation of Turkey, the birth of Arab nationalism, the fall
     of the monarchical principle, the extension of voting rights to women, the introduction of income tax, the introduction of
     Prohibition, the acceptance of total war, the rise of Fascism, the rise of mass pacifism.
    However earthshaking that list might once have been, many of its items seem unimportant now because another world war followed—and
     because a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since 1918. Boundaries have been drawn and redrawn, and almost all norms
     of decency broken. There is, however, another list to compile on the Importance of the War, which I've made from other encounters
     during my post-Somme war book binge. This time the great divide of the Great War is in the mind, and some of the items may
     sound embarrassingly familiar to any of my peers who believed his/her worldview to have sprung spontaneously to mind, ex nihiby during a station break. It is generally accepted that the Great War and its fifty-two months of senseless slaughter encouraged,
     or amplified, among other things: the loss of a belief in progress, a mistrust of technology, the loss of religious faith,
     the loss of a belief in Western cultural superiority, the rejection of class distinctions, the rejection of traditional sexual
     roles, the birth of the Modern, the rejection of the