Introduction

‘Certain things go inevitably with war and are war. The main thing is fighting, winning, killing and being killed, being masculine and aggressive and abnormally vigorous, violent and physical.’The experience of total war dominated the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Not only did the First World War inaugurate a new era in warfare, but its memory, commemoration and image was also incorporated in a profound sense into the culture of the interwar period. Combatants' memories and cinematic images contributed to keeping the war ever-present, as much in the pacifist desires of those who abhorred it as in the militarist ambitions of those intoxicated by it. The spirit of the trenches was to be reborn in the new fascist man of the 1920s and 1930s. As the opening quotation suggests, soldiering was the quintessential masculine experience. Military service – repackaged as national service during peacetime – was a school for forging men from callow boys, a cultural supposition which spanned the political divides of left and right, democracies and dictatorships. The experience of war restated and exaggerated conventional expectations of men and women. Indeed, for some theorists, war in the twentieth century was men's equivalent to women's experience of child-bearing. The front was an heroic, male arena, explicitly contrasted to the home front where women, children and those ‘unmanned’ by age or injury provided support and succour for the soldiers.