World Depression and the New Deal

Abstract

On 10 November 1920, the eve of Armistice remembrance, the French government brought to Paris from Verdun, scene of the apocalyptic struggle of 1916, the remains of an unknown soldier. They were reinterred in a place of honour under the Arc de Triomphe and over them was lit a perpetual flame of remembrance. This symbolic act seized the imagination of people all over the world; within a short time, unknown warriors had joined the great in the national shrines of many capital cities. At the same time, in war cemeteries from Flanders to Gallipoli, from Tannenberg to Caporetto, the war dead of the ‘lost generation’ were commemorated under a forest of crosses and war memorials, each man’s name, rank and number being the last service to his individual identity which the mass slaughter of modern warfare permitted. In death as in life the twentieth century had brought the common man into his own.