Great War Irony

Remotely (of course) some of my students are completing their study of literature about the Great War. A new text (for me) that I've had them read this year is a Muriel Spark short story "The First Year of My Life." The premise of the story, as the narrator tells us, is that newborn babies are omniscient. As she was born in the last year of the Great War, she can recall tuning in to the German spring offensive and the Czar getting executed and debates in the House of Commons, etc. And as a baby she wouldn't smile, a source of great consternation to her family. The story ends with her first birthday party, the end of the war, and - at last - her first smile, aroused by a politician's smarmy ex post facto rationalization of mass slaughter:

More parents and children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I always think those words of Asquith’s after the armistice were so apt… ’  

They brought the cake close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’   

‘She’ll smile in time,’ my mother said, obviously upset.   

‘What Asquith told the House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his backside to the fire, ‘– so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has cleansed and purged the world, by God! recall his actual words: “All things have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege of our country to play her part… ”’   

That did it. I broke into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my mother.  

‘It was the candle on her cake,’ they said.   

The cake be damned. Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy and housetrained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished, the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.

Yes.  The "Whatever, man" smile.

Speaking of the lingering influence of that war on the modern world, Paul Fussell wrote, “There seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; it is essentially ironic; and it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.”

The end of "The First Year of My Life" is a pretty good literary evocation of that idea.