“It’s come too late for me”: War, Peace, and Commemoration, 1914-Present
In Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain reflects that the Armistice has “come too late”: “[the people] did not cry jubilantly: ‘We’ve won the War!’ They only said: ‘The War is over’” (421-2). This panel addresses practices of memory and commemoration, particularly relating to the fraught relationship(s) between war and peace, and the ways in which, as Madelyn Detloff reminds us, we exist in a “‘patched’ present troubled by modernist constellations of personal trauma, militarized violence, and ‘imperial loss’” (Modernism 10).