The traumatic event of the First World War (1914-191) saw the development of conflicts between the generation too old to fight and the generation of the trenches did a great deal to re-shape the old authoriterian pattern. The peace of Versailles seemed, to a generation who distrusted the politians as much as it had lerned to despise the generals, to play the old imperialist game. The war has been the subject of a hundred memoirs , defining in their varied terms its impact on the shocked nerves of a generation. What in essence died , Lawrence tried to reveal. It was in 1915 the old world ended.............. is as guilty as the actual stinking mongrelism it gives place to. (Kangaroo, 1923)

The divisive effects of two world wars, which undermined the ideal of a common international entreprise informed by an internationally acceptable point of view, and the increasing specialization and variety within the historical discipline itself have left history in much the same state of complex and divided purpose that marks all contemporary intellectual life. The earlier optimism that promised inminent recovery of truth of the past has been replaced.by the belief that no accumulation of facts constitues history as an intelligible structure and no historian can be a totally neutral, impersonal recorder of an objective reality.

The writers were under the compulsion to report, to inform and however indirectly to warn. All were affected by the new human experience of the war (Brooke’s idealistic view of fighting men had been borne out in the past) the relationship between officers and men, with its ‘depth of understanding and sympathy for which there is no parallel in civilian life’ as Herbert Read has put it :‘the relation was...... like that of a priest to his parish’. These writers were not only priests, they were interpreters.

Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928) is a classic with an accurate and detailed observation of the war scene and its human figures. Goodbye to All That 1929) Robert Grave’s autobiography deals with his war experience.

In the period following the Second World War Marxism as an influence in the sphere of practical politics suffered an eclipse because of the expansionist behaviour of the Russians.