The idea that the writer-soldiers of WWI were united in their scribblings about the horrific meaningless of war - is that even true of England? Or is that just the understanding in (politically) popular fashion when the canon of New Criticsm was set in ‘40s America, and still taught in high schools out of inertia? And how much should that supposed consensus be asterisked by factors like the state of poetic fashion under the Bloomsbury Set, and the marginality of land warfare in the English imaginary such that the rah-rah Kipling types tended to the Colonial Service and not the Army?

Because I mean, god knows that’s not the lesson your d’Annunzios and Jüngers took from the experience. On the Continent it seems a lot of clever men returned from the front quite impressed by war and its potential as a means of resolving politics, seeing no reason to confine this potential to foreign affairs.

And it’s not like they were wrong!

For ages wise minds had mulled over the great Social Questions - the Labor Question, the National Question, the Jewish Question - without ever resolving anything, but the Bolsheviks established that with sufficient force they were amenable to a simple “Yes”. And then the Sparticists mistook this for an endorsement of “Yes” and failed in their weakness, only to see the Nazis prove that strength was the decisive factor, with which “No” was equally viable.