The Great War -- Out of Modern Memory

MrsDarwin and I have become quite curious to see Flyboys. The Great War and aviation have always been interests of mine, and since the great accusations I've seen leveled against it so far are essentially "sure it's well made and great looking, but it's just some sweet innocent movie that could have been made 50 years ago" I've become more interested in it rather than less.

To whit, I was reading an article about the making of the movie in Friday's WSJ, where it was said:

Another thing militating against World War I movies is that few people are still alive with first-hand memories of the war, and it isn't a big part of public consciousness. "Even among people who live and breathe aviation, there are very few who can tell you much about the planes or the flying experiences of World War I," said Jay Miller, an Arlington, Texas, aviation author.

I don't know that this is actually one of the things that the authors was thinking of, but it seems to me that the greatest difficulty for any modern author writing about the Great War is that the world changed so much during the course of the war, that it's very difficult to portray how it was that people went into the war. Films like All Quiet On The Western Front and Paths of Glory view the war so much through the lens of what it did to the world, that they tell us little about how the world got itself into such a place.

Change is always the driver of drama, and thus the change that turned the Edwardian world into the nightmare of the trenches seems like the most interesting story about World War I. And yet, to our modern post-Great-War eyes, the Edwardian era is far more alien than the 20s and 30s. The Great War created sea change in Western Civilization, and it is only with a certain degree of effort that we can push ourselves back into the mentality of a world that had never yet entered a World War.