“It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory.”
— Guillaume Apollinaire, “Il Pleut”

Many accounts of the war focus on quantitative losses: millions dead, wounded, or displaced. Yet, as a certain Georgian brigand once said, ‘The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.’ There is something that is fundamentally lost when discussing destruction on such a scale. Instead, I will attempt to emphasise the quality of what was lost, the type of men killed, the roles they were meant to play in society, and how even those who survived were fundamentally changed.

The quality of the losses:

As we know the death toll from the first world war was immense, with over 37 million military and civilian deaths all told. Military deaths were around 10 million with an additional 21 million military woundings. An often-overlooked fact is that the average age of the soldiers who died was somewhere between 19-21 years old. Although any death is a tragedy and any society hit by this amount of fatalities would be changed, the particular quality of the young men who lost their lives in the trenches had an even more outsized effect on society than their already large numbers would beget.

To understand the nature of what was lost in the First World War, Britain offers a particularly illustrative case. Excluding its empire, Britain suffered approximately 2.6 million military casualties, of which around 900,000 were killed.

Contrary to modern sensibilities and expectations, these losses were not borne equally across society. In fact, it was the aristocracy and upper classes who suffered disproportionately often because they volunteered early, were fast-tracked as junior officers, and led from the front.

Consider the following examples:

• Eton College, perhaps Britain’s most elite school, lost over 1,100 former pupils by 1918. Some year groups lost more than half their members.

• Oxford and Cambridge universities lost over 18,000 alumni combined. At Balliol College, Oxford, nearly two-thirds of the 1913 intake were dead by 1918.

• Winchester College lost over 500 old boys. In certain year groups, almost every student was killed.

• Among the aristocracy, one in five peers lost a son. Over 1,200 sons of titled families died in the war.

• As a result, 140 hereditary titles changed hands due to wartime deaths. Some went into abeyance or extinction due to a lack of surviving male heirs.

One prominent school headmaster summarised the loss poignantly:

“Our best boys have gone. Not the weaklings, not the failures—only the best.”

The impact of the war extended beyond the battlefield. In Britain, the loss of nearly a million men disproportionately drawn from the upper and middle classes left profound demographic imbalances. At elite girls’ boarding schools, pupils were quietly told not to expect marriage. There were simply not enough eligible men of their social class left to marry.

By the early 1920s, it was estimated that one in eight British women of marriageable age would never marry—a figure that was significantly higher in the educated and professional classes. These women became known as ‘the surplus women.’

Novelist Winifred Holtby captured their despair in a letter to a friend in 1921:

“We sat in our lectures and stitched our samplers and learned to smile at the right moments and nobody told us that there would be no dances, no courtship, no future with a husband and children. We were trained for a world that had ceased to exist.”

The situation in France and Germany was no less severe. Vast numbers of educated young men had been lost. In both countries, entire cohorts of male students, professionals, and athletes had been killed or maimed. After the war, both nations struggled to field Olympic teams in several sports. The French Olympic Committee reportedly observed:

“We field a team not of champions, but of survivors. Our glory is that they are here at all.”

Like their British counterparts, hundreds of thousands of French and German women found themselves alone, widowed, or unmarried with no prospects. One French teacher wrote in her 1922 diary her recommendations for advice to young women:

‘There are too few young men. Tell them to work hard and find joy in God or literature. The future they expected has gone.’

In addition to the outsized losses of the aristocracy and upper classes, Europe also experienced a culling of its leading artists and cultural figures. Many who were cut down in the prime of their careers, this is not even considering the vast number of men who perhaps could have gone on to become an influential artist had they survived the war. Remember that the average age of death for a soldier was around 20, think of all the masterpieces which were never written. Below is a list of just some of the famous artists who were killed during the war:

• Henri Gaudier-Brzeska – Sculptor associated with the Vorticist movement.

• Franz Marc – German Expressionist painter known for vivid animal imagery.

• Umberto Boccioni – Futurist painter and sculptor.

• Wilfred Owen – War poet.

• Isaac Rosenberg – Poet and painter.

• Charles Sorley – Lyric poet.

• Rupert Brooke – Poet and author of patriotic war sonnets.

• Edward Thomas – Nature poet.

• Guillaume Apollinaire – Poet and early surrealist.

• Alain-Fournier – Novelist.

• George Butterworth – Composer.

• Albéric Magnard – Composer.

• Frederick Septimus Kelly – Composer and Olympic athlete.

Thus, the figure of 10 million military dead for WWI although a staggering number does not fully convey the true loss to European society. As it is 10 million twentiesh year old men, cut down before their prime, many of these 10 million men were from the uppermost echelons of society, particularly in culture and arts, who were meant to be the future leaders of the Europe. Instead, they were slaughtered en masse on the fields of Belgium and France, in the Carpathians and Galicia, in the Alps, and on the beaches of Gallipoli.

It has been argued by some online that the genetic loss of two successive generations of the boldest of European men being culled through the world wars lead to a terminal deterioration in the gene pool of Europeans. I’m not sure if that is the case (it might be), however you could say with almost total conviction that the loss of those bold young men definitely effected the social and political fate of Europe in negative ways. The destruction of the last aristocratic heritage in Europe both literally through their death and symbolically through the collapse of the social order, deprived Europe of their natural future leaders. The continent instead slided into ideology of mass political movements dominating the early part of the twentieth century through revolution, totalitarianism, and later, mass democracy. By the end of the Second World War, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union some four decades later, Europe found itself no longer guided by any internal civilisational compass, but instead absorbed into a system of American-style liberal capitalism (which as my previous stack pointed out through Yockey) was: technocratic, managerial, and spiritually hollow.

The aftermath of the First World war:

In Australia, public observance of Remembrance Day which is held annually on the 11^th of November to mark the end of the First World War has faded in prominence. Increasingly, it is viewed by some as anachronistic or jingoistic, and at odds with a modern, multicultural identity.

Yet historically, Remembrance Day was always a day of solemn reflection. It carried deeply pacifistic undertones, grounded in the idea that the horrors of industrialised killing in the trenches via gas, artillery, and mass slaughter must never be repeated.

But of course, they were.

Only two decades later, the same continent plunged into a conflict even greater in scale and devastation. The notion of “Never Again” became a bitter irony. Crowley is right to follow Ernst Nolte’s framing: the years 1914 to 1945 should not be understood as two separate wars, but as a single, prolonged European civil war one whose first act ended in stalemate, and whose second ended in collapse.

The Second World War followed inevitably from the unresolved crisis of the First. In 1940, a revitalised Germany launched a devastating campaign against France and achieved total victory in just six weeks this time. France still militarily depleted and spiritually spent by the Great War, was in no condition to resist. Britain remained on the fringes of the conflict, sustaining itself only through mounting debts to the United States. Its wartime survival would come at the price of postwar independence. Meanwhile, the war in the East became the true centre of gravity. Germany and the Soviet Union waged an apocalyptic conflict of unprecedented scale and brutality, culminating in tens of millions of deaths. Germany was eventually overwhelmed by the combined industrial might and vast manpower reserves of the Soviet Union and the United States.

By the war’s end in 1945, Europe had exhausted itself completely. After enduring two cataclysmic wars within a generation, the continent lacked the strength to recover on its own terms. What followed was not reconstruction, but occupation: Soviet control in the East, and American hegemony in the West.

The truly traumatic element of the world wars on the European psyche is the ‘What was it all for?’ question. The first Welt Krieg started as an iteration of the ‘tale as old of time’ stately quadrille in which the major European powers vie for dominance. How did this rather common occurrence spiral into such a suicidal calamity this time? The very flower of western civilisation in the most courageous and boldest young men of the upper parts of society who should have gone on to lead society politically and culturally were sacrificed on the altar of what? For Austria to gain or not gain dominance over Serbia? For Britain to curtail the potential naval power of the Kaiserreich? For Elsaß-Lothringen? These seem like such trivial matters in hindsight considering the terrible cost that was paid.

In the end, no one in Europe won. Whether in 1945, or in the cultural convulsions of the 1960s, or in the geopolitical shifts following the Cold War's end in the late 1980s, the outcome was the same: a continent spiritually hollowed out, historically unmoored and politically subdued.

This domination continues to the present day. In 2023, when Ukrainian operatives likely acting under U.S. instigation sabotaged the Nord Stream pipeline into Europe, thereby hobbling the continent’s last major node of economic productivity, German manufacturing (which relies heavily on cheap Russian energy), nothing happened. There was no unified protest, no serious diplomatic reprisal, no assertion of European strategic interest. Instead, vague insinuations were made toward Russia despite the geopolitical logic and technical evidence pointing elsewhere. This silence speaks to a deeper issue. Europe, once confident in its identity and heritage, now actively polices its own memory. Political and cultural elites work not to revive Europe but to further suppress it branding expressions of national pride and concerns over demographic stability, or cultural continuity as dangerous or reactionary. Today, political movements that seek to somewhat preserve European heritage or reassert some form of European sovereignity are actively discriminated by the liberal regimes, whether it is the jailing of right party leaders like Marine Le pen most recently or the calls to ban the AfD the largest German somewhat right party. Thus the world wars did not merely end Europe’s political independence they severed its civilisational confidence, a loss whose consequences are still unfolding.

The silence of the postwar era was never peace but surrender. Europe did not recover; it was instead reprogrammed. The two world wars were not just geopolitical catastrophes but something more akin to a civilisational break, after which Europe was no longer permitted to remember what it had once been. As Chad Crowley notes, the conflict never truly ended. The civil war that began in Sarajevo did not conclude in Berlin or Dresden. It shifted shape from an open conflict to psychological and frankly spiritual subjugation.

Nick Land once tweeted that if Europe reawakens, it won’t be gentle. It will be violent, sudden and convulsive. This is because that is Europe’s nature which is older, darker and less forgiving than America’s. If or when that awakening comes is unclear, but if it does, it perhaps won’t come through elections but instead through pain.

For now, Europe is quiet. Ruled by sclerotic regimes who seek to undermine any sense of European sovereignty or pride. However perhaps Europe is not dead yet, but in a deep slumber, to perhaps awaken once more.

X- @midtierbugman