The Great War and Modern Memory

On the first morning of the Somme the infantry were told the wire had been cut and ordered to walk, not run, across no man's land; twenty thousand were dead by nightfall. Paul Fussell, who at twenty took the shell burst in Alsace that killed the sergeant beside him, spent the rest of his life reading the poems and memoirs of a war he never fought, and found in them the hour the modern mind learned its first language: irony.