PARIS, Feb 26 — The horrors and heroism of the trenches. The mustard gas and the mud. The poppies and the poetry.

A century on, World War I still resonates powerfully but the way it is remembered varies markedly between the countries that took part.

For some, the 1914-18 conflict is imprinted on the national DNA because it led to independence or was the crucible in which a new national identity was forged.

But for others, especially those on the losing side, the Great War’s significance has been eclipsed by subsequent, more traumatic phases in their history culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.

As victors, Britain and France quickly placed official commemorations within a narrative of national resilience and valour.

November 11, the date of the Armistice that ended the fighting, has been a public holiday in France since 1922.

Monuments in even the tiniest of villages bear witness to the scale of the slaughter endured in the country that hosted more fighting than any other.

In Britain, the Armistice is marked by Remembrance Sunday, which remains a fixture of national life to the extent that the associated wearing of poppies has become a means for recent immigrants to express their attachment to their adopted homeland.

The poppy’s status as a symbol of remembrance is part of the literary legacy of the war, the tiny red flower’s growth on battlefield graves having first been highlighted in Canadian officer John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Field.”

Dulce et Decorum Est

The war also had a social legacy. The sacrifices made by the conflict’s foot soldiers, Australia and New Zealand’s “Diggers”, Britain’s “Tommies” and France’s “Poilus” (the unshaven), contributed to a recognition that the pre-War order had to be resculpted.

In Australia and New Zealand, the war is credited with giving birth to new, egalitarian national identities based on a concept of “mateship” born in the trenches.

In Turkey, the fight for independence from Allied occupation following the war lay the foundations for a modern state whose secular features are still being fought over to this day. Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States all gained, or regained, independence in the aftermath of the conflict.

As soon as it was over, the war and the tactics that sent thousands to their deaths at the Somme, Verdun or Gallipoli, began to be questioned.

Generations of British schoolchildren were taught to remember their dead forefathers, but also learned, in the words of Wilfred Owen’s most famous poem, not to trust: “The Old Lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (sweet and right it is to die for one’s country).”

Now, the teaching of the war is increasingly focused on the experience of ordinary people.

“We know so much about the big events of the war. What we want to do now is to understand what these soldiers who believed the war would be finished before Christmas (1914) felt and thought, or what it was like for people living in villages that lost all of their young people,” said Bonnie Greer, a writer who is one of the advisers to the British government on the centenary commemorations.

A forgotten war in the United States

Germany has no memorial day for the two million people the country lost in World War I, and the conflict has come to be viewed through the prism of the rise of Nazism, which most historians see as being rooted in the defeat of 1918 and the economic ruin that followed a punitive post-war settlement enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles.

The fact that the war was fought outside of Germany has also reduced its place in the country’s consciousness. “There are a few monuments to the German fallen of 14-18, notably in churches, but there are far less of them than in France, for example,” said Thomas Serrier of the European University Viadrina.

It is a similar story in Austria, where school teaching tends to focus on WWII, despite the 1914-18 conflict having brought down the curtain on the Austro-Hungarian empire, and in the United States, whose entry into the war in 1917 was decisive in tilting the outcome in favour of its allies.

“Almost five million Americans served during the war and 116,500 died in it but people don’t think about it much. It is a forgotten war,” said Peter Kuznick of the American University of Washington. World War II and Vietnam left more lasting traces on the national psyche, he says.

In neighbouring Canada, “In Flanders Field” remains the country’s best-known poem and the 66,000 troops who died under British command are remembered each year.

But, for French Canadians, the War is equally recalled for the deadly Easter 1918 riots which erupted when the federal government attempted to impose conscription in Quebec.

Russian memories of the war were for decades eclipsed by the shadow of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the carnage of World War II.

But that has started to change recently with President Vladimir Putin having last year made August 1 a day of commemoration for the two million Russians who died in the first war.

Recent years have also seen a shift in how those who refused to fight are remembered, with Britain issuing posthumous pardons for soldiers shot for desertion, cowardice or other offences after military tribunals.

The collective memory is still evolving: this anniversary year will only continue that process. — AFP