11.11 is Armistice Day, the strange celebration of the end of the Great War. At the time, most didn’t think, like the famous Marshal Foch, that they were only signing a 20-year armistice; nor perhaps that empires would soon collapse… In Tender is the night, Fitzgerald has his protagonist, Dick Diver, enthuse about what it took to fight that war:
Dick turned the corner of the traverse & continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up on the step & peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval. Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with sadness. He went on along the trench…
‘This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer… See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front & pushing forward behind. & another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.
This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion & years of plenty & tremendous sureties & the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians & Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, & postcards of the Crown Prince & his fiancée, & little cafés in Valence & beer gardens in Unter den Linden & weddings at the mairie, & going to the Derby, & your grandfather’s whiskers.
This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll & Jules Verne & whoever wrote Undine, & country deacons bowling & marraines in Marseilles & girls seduced in the back lanes of Württemberg & Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.
All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love.’
I wrote another post about Tender is the night, a particularly astute aspect of Fitzgerald’s study of American mores: