9 - Epilogue: death, grief and the Great War

Summary

Much has been written concerning the impact of the Great War on cultures of death and grief. For many historians, the volume and horror of young men's deaths in foreign fields rendered the Victorian display of mourning inappropriate. In its place grew a subdued, silent and privatised culture of grief that persisted throughout most of the twentieth century. David Cannadine argued that this shift was for the better: responses to grief during the First World War overwhelmingly minimised national, material and religious difference to emphasise the universality of human experiences of loss, giving rise to a sincere and egalitarian culture of death. Others, notably Gorer and Ariès, interpreted the shift negatively, arguing that death was increasingly hidden from public view: people died in hospitals, funeral directors removed corpses to chapels of rest, and a decline in religious belief denied the bereaved a language of hope and reunion. Cultures of death were reduced to the embarrassed and speedy dispatch of the corpse whilst friends avoided mention of the death, preferring to send a mass-produced ‘With Sympathy’ card which required no personal input beyond a signature.

Contesting the status of the war as a hiatus in cultures of death, other commentators have emphasised the continuities between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In working-class burial custom, much remained the same until at least the Second World War. As Wilson and Levy noted in their call for burial reform in the 1930s, cultural habits were slow to change.