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The twentieth century has witnessed a revolution in the image of war and of soldiers. The age-old romantic image of war has been discredited; war has increasingly been interpreted as a disillusioning experience; and the soldier has been at least partly transformed from hero to victim. This article examines the roots of this revolution, by comparing twentieth-century and Renaissance military memoirs. It argues that this revolution did not result from twentieth-century military or technological changes in the nature of war, but rather from cultural and mental changes in soldiers' self-perception and in their expectations of life, that occurred between 1600 and 1900.
SCHOLARS studying twentieth-century war memoirs have reached the almost unanimous conclusion that in the twentieth century, at least in the West, soldiers have become disillusioned with war, and their own image has partly changed from that of heroes to that of victims. Following Paul Fussell's dictum that "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,"1 scholars such as Tobey G. Herzog agree that the main themes of twentieth-century war memoirs are "[t]he tension between the soldier's romantic expectations of war and the harsh realities of the battlefield,"2 and "the soldiers' loss of their youthful naïveté as they acquire a battlefield education."3
It is no coincidence that many of the scholars who studied these war memoirs are themselves veterans, including Fussell and Herzog, for the other main conclusion from studying twentieth-century war memoirs is that many soldiers, having become disillusioned with the romantic image of war, have set themselves the task of actively destroying this image, and preventing future generations from falling victim to it. Twentieth-century veterans have produced a growing avalanche of war books, war poems, war paintings, war films, and academic war studies, all geared to tear away the romantic mask of war, and unmask war's "true face."
Already in 1930 a French historian and veteran of World War I (1914-18), Jean Norton Cru, wrote a study of World War I war books, which sets up the following structure: prewar illusions lead men to war, the war shatters these illusions, and the embittered survivors have the duty and the ability to disillusion the public. Norton Cru explains that
On the score of courage, patriotism, sacrifice and death,...