ABSTRACT
In England in the late 1920s, authors like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden began to write about their experiences at the front of the Great War. They did not settle simply for a pacifist condemnation, but said goodbye to an old world of faith in progress and optimism about the future. A general questioning of the nature of the individual, the possibility of the good and the value of civilization followed in literature and elsewhere. A new sensibility especially of the individual but also of modernity and the nation was then formulated. 1 Part of the new understanding was that an army could only serve to overcome the forces of militaristic and perverted societies. Military conflict was at best a temporarily inevitable aberration.
