The costs of the Great War were truly astronomical. As with the number of stars, the final accounting is in God’s hands. The slaughters, the treasure, the faith in some kind of order of society – all of these were costs of the war. As Wilfred Owen suggested in his terrible poem "Strange Meeting," the culture of Europe seemed hell-bent on trekking away from progress toward something that literary historian Paul Fussell would later call the troglodyte world: a kind of Hobbesian vision, one might say, rendered in pen and ink by Otto Dix. Costs indeed. Yet this essay has … Continue reading Some Costs of the Great War: Nationalizing Private Life