What is it about war that causes nostalgia? Are the pre-bellum days viewed simply, with the hazy softened focus of longing, as days of peace? The harsh and horrific time of war necessarily evokes a sense of the past as a time when things were better, were “before”…
Certainly, the experience of war, both on the homefront and the battlefront, has been described as creating a sharp divide between the war itself and what came before. For me, Malcolm Cowley’s 1934 memoir, Exiles’ Return, powerfully conveys the sense of before, as does Modris Ekstein’s history, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age.
But it is perhaps Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, that most powerfully conveys the way that war evokes nostalgia.
Written during World War II, between December 1943 and June 1944, Waugh’s book, created within the context of the war itself, and not afterwards, is an eerie portrait of one man’s looking back, casting his eyes over the wreckage of war to a time that he portrays not necessarily as better, but as prelude. His character, Charles Ryder, perceives the past as wrought with longing, with love, and with loss, littered with mistakes. The war, in some ways, seems the culmination of what came before it; the past is not sharply drawn as merely or ideally peaceful, but tainted with a sense of foreboding; the past as foreshadow.
The nostalgia that settles on Waugh as he penned his masterful novel must have seemed unbearable. Nostalgia, after all, was once viewed as a “disease of the mind,” an affliction that was particularly diagnosed in soldiers.
There is no question that war creates a sense of breaking with the past—the before. How we understand the nature of what leads to war, and its inevitable destruction, is a challenge that we face as we confront our own sense of longing for the days before. Perhaps we are longing for days of peace?