* I first posted this essay in the Fall of 2014 by way of commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Sadly, in view of geopolitical events within only the first few days of this new year, it is just as relevant today.*

The First World War broke out one hundred years ago, changing or ending many people’s lives and ushering in the supposedly short 20th century, into whose slipstream everyone alive today was born.

I have, thanks to a cousin who is an assiduous family archivist, an ancient photograph of my grandmother and her school colleagues on graduation day, at the end of the 1913/1914 academic year, days before the outbreak of what would come to be known as the Great War.

My grandmother was ten years old at the time. As recently as one hundred years ago, this was the normal school-leaving age for all but the super-rich in the wealthiest country in the world.

The poetic license of hindsight perceives an expression of foreboding in the eyes of these stiffly-posed but still obviously fidgeting children forced before a camera. Their faces distorted by a combination of their own discomfort and the low-tech of slow shutter speed photography.

It is impossible not to wonder how many—of the boys—would go on to lie about their age and enlist to die on the front or how many blanks would be left in the coming decades, as these children succumbed to tuberculosis, Spanish flu, psychological and economic depression, or the perils of a precocious unplanned pregnancy.

But the picture also summons up a heart-wrenching, albeit obviously illusory, feel of pastoral nostalgia for an imagined age of innocence that preceded the industrial carnage of the decades that ensued. The last summer before the lingering fog of gas and war set in. A horror that has never quite lifted.

*

The causes and the origins of wars tend to remain hotly disputed for centuries, if not millennia; the truth disappearing into the mists of dirt kicked up by competing myths, as time inexorably recedes and consequences become grist for new mills. One street in Sarajevo still erects a statue to a hero who is arch-villain in adjoining neighborhoods.

The utopian pretensions of European union are still frayed by ancient feuds: the feisty independence of Anglo-Saxons, tensions between hard-nosed Teutons and romantically-inclined Franks eyeing each other warily across the Rhine; condescension towards the people of southern Europe, and daggers drawn with new poorly-crafted Islamic nations grudgingly chiseled out of the sand and rock of the battle-scarred ancient lands of the Middle East by supercilious European powers decades ago.

The horrors of the unfinished business of a century ago are now played out in Gaza, Aleppo or Mosul, for our entertainment every day on TV. And the same murderous or dismissive sentiments prevail.

*

The part of Virgil’s Aeneid that always moved me most was the introduction to Book VII. It marks the transition from the Odyssean to the Iliadic half of the Latin poet’s subtly subversive propagandist epic, reversing the logical and chronological order of its orally-transmitted Homeric precursors.

Homer’s semi-mythical heroes, slighted by an elopement, set out on an epic honor killing, get bogged down in an eleven-year-long largely thankless slog of a war, win by a ruse, trash Troy, and, with the exception of the wily Odysseus, are cut down by the consequences of their own misdeeds, as they wend their way back home across the perilous sea between Turkey and Greece in boats held together by twigs and rowed by slaves.

Virgil’s epic is almost the opposite. Refugees from a ravaged Troy drift around the Mediterranean, defy the outright rejection and the subtle poison of seduction of foreign lands and eventually wash up, like modern-day immigrants, on Italian shores: their supposed promised land.

Book VII begins with the tantalizing promise of a happy ending. The Latians are keen to show hospitality towards the new-comers; the Trojan immigrants eager to fit in. They are on the verge of an historic peace agreement, until a pet deer belonging to a princess strays onto this tense world-historical scene and is accidentally shot dead by border guards.

All hell—literally in the imaginings of the ancients—breaks loose… A bloody repetition of the Iliad ensues…

Virgil’s epic ends on a note of poignant and daring ambiguity. Aeneas overcomes his arch-enemy (Turnus) in a final single-combat showdown, yet is prepared to spare him and put an end to the seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence, until he notices that his rival is wearing a trophy plucked from the corpse of a beloved young protégé he has killed in the course of the war. Rage and revenge condense into a savagery of summary justice and the epic ends with Aeneas butchering his defeated enemy. The end of the war is precipitated by the very same sentimentality that sparked it in the first place. All does not augur well for the future pax Romana…

*

The First World War was triggered by a romantically-inclined adolescent killing an archduke swathed in the romance of a jaded Empire. The blanks left by the dead in the school photo of my grandmother’s graduation ceremony cry out for dispassionate kindness, but not idolization or revenge.

An excess of sentiment, amidst conflicting views of righteousness, only serves as an accelerant for the arson of hate. Sometimes justice is best served by forgetting the sentimental causes of war, forgoing nostalgia for an apparently golden age, and forgiving the injustices to which sentimentality has previously given rise; tearing off the end of the page, making a new start.