In the preface to the 1940 edition of Liddell and Scott, there is a reference to "The Four Years War".
Has anybody else come across this way of describing World War One? Or is there something I have misunderstood? I suppose 1939/1940 would have been a moment at which "the Great War", and other familiar naming conventions, might call for reconsideration?
One of the baddies in Hideous Strength, Professor Frost, whose eugenic concerns incline him to favour a much reduced human population, explains that "the two last wars" were "simply the beginning of the programme--the first two of the sixteen major wars which are scheduled to take place in this century ..."
Lewis signed the book off on Christmas Eve 1943; after Stalingrad.
Liddell Hart still referred to it as the First World War!
ReplyDeleteStrictly speaking, "the Four Years War" would refer to the period of time when trenches were used in World War One, but Liddell-Scott may have applied the phrase to the whole of "the Great War".
ReplyDelete"The trench system on the Western Front in World War I—fixed from the winter of 1914 to the spring of 1918—eventually stretched from the North Sea coast of Belgium southward through France".
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-trenches-are-dug-on-the-western-front#:~:text=The%20trench%20system%20on%20the,the%20much%2Dcontested%20Ypres%20salient.
Hmmm..... This definitately was not the one between the Federation and Klingons thak kicked off at the Battle of Axanar....
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that war would be considered a positive event by a eugenicist. It would seem to select for bone spurs and other undesireable traits.
ReplyDeleteLots of undesirable traits!
DeleteIt is the best who die in wars, and the worst who start them.
ReplyDeletePerhaps WWI could be called the Bureaucrat's War, because it was they, and not the Kings who started it.
Except, of course, in France, with its satanic obsession for revanche, which they called "sacred", and where war was deeply desired by the entire Left, and the faction known as Republicans.