There was no other word for it; but the truth was too unbearable, so as the casualty lists mounted, the human need to find meaning in death, especially young death, had, with some help from the British government, turned the great carnage into the “Great Sacrifice.” Posters of a dead Tommy lying at the foot of the crucified Christ abounded, and rare was the school assembly that did not include a recitation of Rupert Brooke’s poem “The Soldier”:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

Toward noon on Parade Day, a well-dressed, middle-aged woman emerged from the crowd in Whitehall, darted across the street, fell to her knees in front of the Cenotaph, and placed a bouquet of lilacs under the inscription at its base, “The Glorious Dead.” Those spectators still on speaking terms with God offered up a prayer for the woman; those who were not just stared, transfixed by her grief. Then the blare of military music brought the crowd back to life, and the BEF marched by at parade pace under a blazing canopy of brightly colored regimental flags embroidered with the place-names that had become household words in Britain: First Battle of Ypres, Second Battle of Ypres, Third Battle of Ypres, First Battle of the Marne, Second Battle of the Marne, Somme, Loos, Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Gallipoli.

A year after the Victory Day Parade, the remains of six unidentified British soldiers were retrieved from the mud of a Flanders field and sent to a military facility in France, where a blindfolded Guards officer chose one set for internment in England. An hour later the remains were placed inside a casket, specifically designed for the occasion by the British Undertakers Association, and on Armistice Day 1920 the remains were interred at Westminster Abbey with full military honors. For King George V, the Westminster ceremony was the second memorial event of the day. Earlier that morning, he had unveiled a new cenotaph in Whitehall; the temporary plaster and wood model created for the Victory Day Parade had proved such a success that the government had decided to commission a permanent stone version. Soon thereafter, Manchester, Southampton, and Rochdale also had cenotaphs, and as the idea caught on around the empire, so, too, did Toronto, Auckland, and Hong Kong. In the early postwar years, human memorials to the “Great Sacrifice” also abounded. There were the legions of young women—part of Britain’s 1.7 million “surplus women”—who gathered at the local cinema on weekends to dream about Ramón Novarro and Rudolph Valentino, now that all the boys they might have dreamed of had gone to a soldier’s grave. There were the ubiquitous one-armed porters, one-eyed barristers, and one-legged butchers. Mercifully, the government kept the grands mutilés, the grotesquely disfigured of face and limbless of body, out of view in military hospitals.

Contrasting the pre- and postwar mood of Britain, the historian Arnold Toynbee noted that before 1914, “Westerners and . . . British Westerners above all, had felt that they were not as other men were or ever had been . . . Other civilizations had risen and fallen, come and gone but [the British] did not doubt that their own civilization was invulnerable.” After 1918, vicars and public men continued to preach the same old verities in the same old ways, but the preaching had become reflexive, the way a body sometimes twitches after death. The young, having seen where patriotism leads, were throwing over God, King, and Country for pacifism, socialism, communism, trade unionism, internationalism, environmentalism, nudism, flapperism, Dadaism, anarchism, and any other ism they could get their hands on. And the intellectuals, having examined humanity from every imaginable angle, concluded that man’s dark impulses would keep what one of them called the “death ship” of war afloat in perpetuity. The bookstores filled with titles that breathed despair—The Dying Creeds, The Smoke of Our Burning, Life Against Death, and Can Civilization Be Saved? And the old, bewildered by it all and heavy with sorrow, stood in half-empty churches, intoning that most melancholy of English hymns, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

The busy tribes of flesh and blood,

 . . . Carried downwards by the flood

And lost in the . . . years.

Initially, there were great hopes that the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, would deliver a just and enduring peace to the world. But the French and, to a lesser extent, the British public found the treaty’s terms insufficiently onerous, while the Germans, who had come to Versailles seeking mercy, left vowing retribution. The treaty stripped Germany of its colonies, its western border on the Rhine, and transferred several historically German regions to other nations. Asked how long the treaty would last, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the final year of the Great War, evoked the death ship: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”

Except for Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and a few other people the world had yet to hear from, Marshal Foch’s view was not widely shared in the early postwar years. More than 37 million men, women, and children had been killed or wounded in the Great War. That number was nearly five times greater than the population of prewar Belgium (7.5 million), only 3 million less than the population of prewar France (40 million), and only 9 million less than the population of prewar Britain (46 million). Ruminating on the lessons of the Great Sacrifice, the London Illustrated News concluded that all the lessons came down to the same lesson: Never Again. “So vast is the cost of victory, no price can be too high to pay for avoiding the necessity of war.”

During the 1920s, Never Again inspired a new international order based on collective security, disarmament, and the League of Nations. And for a time, the system seemed to work. The 1925 Pact of Locarno—signed by Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy—guaranteed the borders of Europe. Three years later the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan, Italy, and several other nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Plans were also laid for the World Disarmament Conference. By the late 1920s, European civilization seemed to have emerged from the “brown fog” of despair, cleansed and renewed—like sun after rain.