The Trenches

By 1910, cities around the world were bustling with cars and teeming with skyscrapers, sewer systems, bridges, electricity, and countless astonishing feats of engineering. Public health was vastly improved. Child mortality was plummeting. Life expectancy was growing. For many, everyday life now had much more space for leisure, creative pursuits, and the possibility of self-discovery and expression.

“Progress” was thriving seemingly in every facet of life and every corner of the “civilized” world. In many’s eyes, humanity was off to the races, on its way toward the perfect society.

But in 1914, that sense of hope and progress all came crashing down. The Great War, now known as World War I, erupted across Europe and around the world.

For centuries, humans in the West had been galvanized around the concepts of liberty and reason. Governments had heightened their commitment to social services that kept their constituents healthy. More were able to pursue education and art. More than ever, or so it seemed, we truly appreciated the value and depth of human existence. We were no longer relegated to a life of peasantry, obedience, and even torture, Now, human life really meant something, we told ourselves. 

For many, the war proved this spirit of humanity and progress a farce. It had no discernible purpose apart from letting world leaders play with their new killing toys from the safety of their palaces. Soldiers spent month upon month in cold, barren trenches with little to no movement. They died of trench foot and typhus and were paralyzed and haunted by “shell shock” (what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). They charged enemy lines only to be dispassionately slaughtered in droves by Gatling guns, artillery fire, and poisonous gases. A war that they were promised would be over in a just few months stretched on year after year after year.

By the end of the war four years later likely over 60 million people around the world, if not more, were dead. Huge swathes of land were now endless pits of mud and bones. Towns and revered cultural sites were reduced to rubble and ash.

But it wasn’t just all the death and destruction that shook people to their core. It was the utter meaninglessness of it all. 

Perhaps never in the history of humanity had human life meant so little. Perhaps never before had there been a human event that demonstrated the inanity and incompetence of human leaders to show basic care and decency. Unlike The Great Famine and The Black Plague in the 14th Century, humans actually brought this unthinkable slaughter upon themselves by choice.

For many, whatever meaning, purpose, or sense of progress the last several decades or centuries had fostered was now revealed to be empty and insincere. People looked at The Story of Progress and perhaps for the first time saw an illusion, a facade, a lie.