|
Review by James Neal Webb
There's been a lot said and sung and filmed and written about World War I. It was the Great War, the "War to End All Wars," yet it ended with "the flower of England face down in the mud."
The Last Days of Innocence follows the path this country took in the years prior to and during the Great War. Of necessity it follows both the moods of the politicians and of the populace, neither of whom wanted to participate in a conflict half a world away, yet were swept up into it as surely as an adolescent is swept up into the grown-up world by the onset of adulthood. Meirion and Susie Harries point out that we were mere adolescents as a nation, tried and tested in the fire of civil war, to be sure, but gawking teenagers on the world stage, and held in condescending contempt by the old world. It was this same contempt, coupled with the desperate need of the old for the strength of the young, which led the allies to hold out one hand for help, while slapping our face with the other.
In meticulous detail, we are led through the steps this country took in gearing up for war, from the drafting of industries who used their newfound monopoly status for their own gain, to a country driven to extremes of nationalism that make McCarthyism pale in comparison. Then there is the recalcitrant President Woodrow Wilson, dragged by his heels into the war, who then tried to win it with the idea of imposing his own idea of peace upon the world; in the effort, the country was changed, and lost its innocence.
Yet this is not a book about politics. It is ultimately about the war itself, and how the military, hamstrung by politicians in America and abroad, suffered massive loss of life, created a "lost generation," and ultimately forged the nucleus of what would, in the ultimate irony, be the force that would put a stop to the megalomaniacal regime that found its roots in the same source.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
Support your