I do not wish to imply that the "calamity" had raised Saint-Loup's intelligence to a new level. But just as soldier heroes with commonplace and trivial minds, if they happened to write poems during their convalesce, placed themselves, in order to describe the war, at the level not of events, which in themselves are nothing, but of the commonplace aesthetic whose rules they had obeyed in the past, and talked, as they would have ten years earlier of the "blood-stained dawn," "victory's tremulous wings," and so on, so Saint-Loup, by nature much more intelligent and much more of an artist, remained intelligent and an artist, and it was with the greatest good taste that he now recorded for my benefit the observations of landscape which he made if he had to halt at the edge of a marshy forest, very much as he would have done if he had been out duck-shooting. To help me to understand certain contrasts of light and shade which had been "the enchantment of his morning," he alluded in his letter to certain painting which we both loved and was not afraid to cite a passage of Romain Rolland, or even of Nietzsche, with the independent spirit of the man at the front, who had not the civilians' terror of pronouncing a German name, and also - in thus quoting an enemy - with a touch of coquetry, like Colonal du Paty de Clam who, waiting among the witnesses at Zola's trial and changing to pass Pierre Quillard, the violently Dreyfusard poet, whom he did not even know, recited some lines from his synbolist play, La Fille aux Mains Coupees. In the same way if Saint-Loup had occasion in a letter to mention a song by Schumann, he never gave any but the German title, nor did he use his periphrasis to tell me that, when at dawn on the edge of the forest he had heard the first twittering of a bird, his rapture had been as great as though he had been addressed by the bird in that "sublime" Siegfried" which he so looked forward to hearing after the war.
Marcel Proust, Time Regained, pp. 776-777
It is sometimes pointed out that the American Civil War was the first war since the Peloponnesian Wars where the majority of the soldiers were literate, and in this case literate simply means being able to read and write (I don't know if that's true, but it is often pointed out). By comparison, World War I is often considered the first war where most of the combatants were truly literate, and in this case literate means well-educated (at least among the officer class) as the European education system had been developed in the last few decades. This is why there was such extraordinary literature, especially poetry, associated with the First World War. Check out Paul Fussell's extraordinary The Great War and Modern Memory, which was my favorite book from graduate school (and my friend Craig Pepin's as well).
As Fussell much more elegantly explains:
"The American Civil War was the first, Theodor Ropp observes, "in which really larger numbers of literate men fought as common soldiers." By 1914, it was possible for soldiers to be not merely literate but vigorously literate, for the Great War occurred at a special historical moment when two 'liberal' forces were powerfully coinciding in England. On the one hand, the belief in the educative powers of classical and English literature was extremely strong. On the other, the appeal of popular education and 'self-improvement' was at its peak, and each education was still conceived largely in humanistic terms. It was imagined that the study of literature at Workmen's Institutes and through such schemes as the National Home Reading Union would actively assist those of modest origins to rise in the class system. The volumes of the World's Classics and Everyman's Library were to be the 'texts.' The intersection of these two forces, the one 'aristocratic,' and other 'democratic,' established and atmosphere of public respect of literature unique in modern times. It was this respect for literature, unthinkable in today's milieu of very minor poets and journalist-novelists, taht during the war was first nourishing and then ratifying and intellectual and artistic seriousness of James Joyce in Zurich, Ezra Pound in Kensington, and T.S. Eliot in City his City bank. They could be assured of serious readings, like Private John Ball, who at one point takes from his haversack his India Paper edition of Sir Arthur Quiller'Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse and regales himself with bits of William Dunbar's 'Timor Mortis Conturbat Me.'"
It's difficult to imagine that such an age existed, when so few members of the American university system, students and faculty alike, would qualify as "vigorously literate" today.
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