On Veteran's Day, an interesting article by Norman Allen, commenting about public forgetfulness of World War One. He writes: It has been said that beauty and grace died on the battlefields of the Western Front between 1914 and 1918. But the war also succeeded in breaking through the corseted snobbery of Victorian grande dames and the self-indulgence of Edwardian aesthetes. It gave birth to a new and vital worldview. American forces didn’t enter the conflict until April 1917, but the stories they brought back, and the dead they left behind, altered forever the outlook of a nation still riding the wave of Western expansion and pioneer pride. For better and for worse, the Great War was the beginning of our modern era. We live now in a post-apocalyptic age, dating from those days. Fallen monarchies, global communism, Nazism and the Holocaust, cultural vacuity, religious collapse. I am not a pessimist by nature, but I cannot find positives here -- I'd rather have the beauty and grace with "corseted snobbery" and "aesthetes." It's well worth the price.

I found Evelyn Waugh's remarks on the "pre-war Georgian" period most interesting: One is naturally inclined to regard all periods but one's own as a conservative Utopia, where everything was tranquilly rooted in tradition, the rich respected, the poor contented, and everyone slept well and ate with a hearty appetite. Fair enough -- historians are major violators in this regard, picking out their utopias from the dustpin of history, Old South, Medieval Europe, 1960s America. But...still...can we today claim cultural superiority to 1910? Hardly. Political superiority? Doubtful -- quantitative enlargement rather than qualitative improvement, really. Can we really say the world is far improved from the days when these men fell in trenches at Ypres?