George L. Mosse’s Fallen Soldiers (Oxford 1990) is a fascinating study of the “Myth of War Experience” that developed between the French Revolution and came to a climax in World War I and its aftermath. Mosse develops a number of intertwined themes: the rise of volunteer armies after the French Revolution, and the consequent class diversity within Europe’s armies; the cult of manly youth that was prevalent throughout Europe prior to the First World War; the development of special military cemeteries and monuments, many adorned with Christian imagery; the use of Christian iconography in depictions, verbal and iconic, of fallen heroes, transformed into martyrs; and the trivialization of war through, for example, Easter postcards depicting the no man’s land between the trenches as a bucolic landscape. One of the most striking features of this history is the almost total translation of the traditional cult of the martyrs to the cult of fallen soldiers, martyrs sacrificed for the Fatherland.
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