Beyond Cultures of Victory and Cultures of Defeat? Inter-War Veterans’ Internationalism

Abstract

On 12 July 1936, thousands of veterans from eighteen countries, Germans and Italians among them, met at the ossuary of Verdun, filled with body fragments retrieved from the battlefield, to mark the twentieth anniversary of what had become the symbolic battle of the Great War. There, in the presence of the dead and swept by the searchlight from the ossuary’s tower, they swore an oath to uphold peace.¹ Several things are remarkable about the ceremony. It shows that behind the actions of inter-war veterans, particularly those of an international nature that are the subject of this book, lay the war dead, the comrades who had not survived the conflict. It was their presence that empowered the veterans to speak out on political matters. Many others — politicians, church leaders, writers — also tried to capture the moral capital of those who had made the ‘ultimate sacrifice.’ But no group was better placed than the veterans to do so. The sheer scale of the military dead (over ten million) and the fact that civilian deaths were by comparison marginalized, gave the veterans a unique opportunity to pronounce on the meaning of war and peace, and hence on international politics.² They enjoyed no such role after the Second World War, in which two-thirds of the dead were civilians, when the Cold War resulted in very different paths for coming to terms with even greater loss.