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The First World War did not end on 11 November 1918. Its physical, psychological, and cultural consequences shaped the decades that followed and continue to resonate today. For AQA Paper 2, Option 2A — WW1 and its Aftermath — this is not peripheral but half the title of the option: many of the set texts were written not during the war but in its wake, and their meaning is shaped by the experience of living on with what the war had done. The aftermath is the air the prose of Barker and the memoir of Brittain breathe; it is the silence behind the two-minute pause and the empty tomb of the Cenotaph. This lesson supplies the contextual and critical foundation for reading the "Aftermath" dimension of every genre in the option.
This is Paper 2 of AQA A-Level English Literature A (7712), Texts in Shared Contexts, Option 2A: WW1 and its Aftermath. The "Aftermath" emphasis runs through every Section A task and frequently shapes the Section B unseen extract. The objectives, with their typical weighting for this material:
| Assessment Objective | What it rewards | Relevance to this lesson |
|---|---|---|
| AO1 | Coherent, terminologically precise argument | Handling elegy, the "empty tomb," commemoration, trauma with accuracy |
| AO2 | Analysis of how meaning is shaped by language, form, structure | Owen's hallucinatory imagery; the monumental Roman numerals of Larkin's title; the rhetoric of memorial inscription |
| AO3 (dominant here) | The significance and influence of contexts of production and reception | Shell shock, memorialisation, the "lost generation," the construction of memory over a century |
| AO4 | Connections across literary texts | Tracing trauma and mourning across poetry, prose, and drama |
| AO5 | Different interpretations, including critical and theoretical reading | Whether commemoration consoles or evades; how memory is made (Fussell, Hynes) |
AO3 is dominant for this material, but — as throughout this paper — context earns its marks only when it does analytical work. A candidate who narrates the building of the Cenotaph or lists casualty figures without connecting them to a text scores poorly. The skill is to show how the aftermath's distinctive conditions — the unburied dead, the institutionalised survivor, the ritualised silence — shape the form and meaning of specific literary works.
The psychological consequences of the war were massive, poorly understood, and inadequately treated. The term "shell shock" — coined by Dr Charles Myers in 1915 — covered a wide range of symptoms:
| Symptom | Detail |
|---|---|
| Physical symptoms | Trembling, paralysis, blindness, deafness, mutism — with no apparent physical cause |
| Nightmares | Recurring, vivid dreams of combat; inability to sleep |
| Flashbacks | Involuntary reliving of traumatic events, triggered by sounds, smells, or situations |
| Emotional numbing | Inability to feel emotion; detachment from others; sense of unreality |
| Hypervigilance | Constant alertness; inability to relax; exaggerated startle response |
| Survivor's guilt | Anguish at having survived when comrades did not |
| Method | Detail |
|---|---|
| Rivers's "talking cure" | Dr W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglockhart used a precursor of psychotherapy, encouraging patients to recall and process traumatic memories. This is the method depicted in Barker's Regeneration |
| Yealland's electrotherapy | Dr Lewis Yealland used electric shocks to treat "hysterical" symptoms. His method was coercive and sometimes brutal — patients were told they would not leave the treatment room until they were "cured." Barker depicts this in Regeneration as a counterpoint to Rivers's humane approach |
| Discipline | Many ordinary soldiers with shell shock symptoms were punished rather than treated. Some were shot for "cowardice" or "desertion" — men who were, in modern understanding, suffering from PTSD. Between 1914 and 1920, the British Army executed 306 soldiers for military offences, many of whom were almost certainly suffering from psychological trauma |
AO3 Significance: The treatment of shell shock reveals the intersection of medicine, class, and military authority. Officers were treated therapeutically at hospitals like Craiglockhart; ordinary soldiers were more likely to face punishment. The distinction between "genuine" illness and "malingering" or "cowardice" was a class distinction as much as a medical one.
| Text | How Shell Shock Is Represented |
|---|---|
| Barker, Regeneration | The central subject: Rivers treats Sassoon, Prior, and other officers. The novel explores how trauma manifests in different individuals and the ethical dilemmas of treatment |
| Owen, "Mental Cases" | Describes shell-shocked soldiers: "These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished." The poem uses surreal, hallucinatory imagery to convey the internal landscape of trauma |
| Woolf, Mrs Dalloway | Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, hallucinates and eventually commits suicide. His suffering is set against the superficial social world of post-war London |
| Sherriff, Journey's End | Stanhope's alcoholism is a form of self-medication for what is clearly PTSD. His deterioration over the play's few days represents the cumulative effect of sustained combat stress |
The literary treatment of shell shock is worth dwelling on because it shows the aftermath reaching back into the war and forward out of it at once. Owen's "Mental Cases" — written at Craiglockhart, the very hospital Barker would later fictionalise — renders the trauma not as a wound that heals but as a permanent disfigurement of the mind: the survivors are men "whose minds the Dead have ravished," the violent verb "ravished" casting trauma as a kind of assault committed by the dead upon the living, an occupation of the mind from which there is no release. The poem's hallucinatory, present-tense imagery refuses the comfort of retrospect; these men are not remembering the war but perpetually inside it, which is precisely the clinical reality of flashback that the term "shell shock" only crudely named. Set this beside Barker's Regeneration, and a powerful AO4 line opens: what Owen compresses into a nightmare lyric, Barker unfolds into the slow, institutional process of the talking cure — and what both insist upon, against the wartime rhetoric of "cowardice" and "funk," is that the broken mind is a casualty, as real as a severed limb, produced by the war and outlasting it. The aftermath, in this sense, is not a period that begins in November 1918; for the shell-shocked it is a condition that the Armistice does nothing to end.
AO3 Significance (extended): The 306 executions for "cowardice" and "desertion" are the dark counterpart to the Craiglockhart story. Officers like Sassoon were sent to a comfortable hydropathic hospital and treated by a humane physician; ordinary soldiers exhibiting the same symptoms could face the firing squad. The treatment of trauma was thus inseparable from class and rank — a point that gives Prior, Barker's working-class officer, his structural importance, since he sits across the very fault line the system tried to police. (The executed men were granted posthumous pardons by the British government in 2006, an act of belated aftermath that itself belongs to the long, contested afterlife of the war.)
The scale of the war's casualties demanded new forms of remembrance. The culture of memorialisation that developed in the 1920s and 1930s shaped — and was shaped by — the literature of the period.
Designed by Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1920, the Cenotaph in Whitehall became the focal point of national mourning. Its name — Greek for "empty tomb" — is itself significant: it contains no body, representing all the dead through the absence of any specific individual.
The Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) established cemeteries across the Western Front. Each grave is marked by a uniform headstone — officer and private alike — inscribed with name, rank, regiment, date of death, and (if desired by the family) a personal inscription.
Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915, served on the Commission. He chose the inscription for graves of unidentified soldiers: "A Soldier of the Great War — Known unto God." Kipling also selected the biblical phrase inscribed on the Stone of Remembrance in each cemetery: "Their name liveth for evermore."
Introduced on 11 November 1919, the two-minute silence at 11 a.m. on Armistice Day was a radical act of collective remembrance — an entire nation falling silent simultaneously. The silence enacted absence: the missing voices of the dead.
| Text | Response |
|---|---|
| Charlotte Mew, "The Cenotaph" | Questions whether stone monuments can adequately represent human loss: "Not yet will those measureless fields be green again / Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed" |
| Kipling, "The Children" | A bitter, grief-stricken poem that accuses the older generation of sacrificing the young: "That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given / ... To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes — to be cindered by fires" |
| Philip Larkin, "MCMXIV" | A retrospective poem (1964) about the queues of volunteers in August 1914, ending: "Never such innocence, / Never before or since." The Roman numerals of the title create a monumental, memorial quality |
The phrase "the lost generation" — attributed to Gertrude Stein, popularised by Hemingway — refers to the cohort of young men who came of age during the war and were either killed or psychologically damaged by it.
| Country | Military Dead | Military Wounded |
|---|---|---|
| Britain | ~886,000 | ~1,660,000 |
| France | ~1,400,000 | ~4,266,000 |
| Germany | ~2,000,000 | ~4,200,000 |
| Russia | ~1,700,000 | ~4,950,000 |
| Total (all nations) | ~17,000,000 | ~20,000,000 |
The impact was not evenly distributed. The junior officer class — young men from the public schools and universities — suffered disproportionate casualties, in part because subalterns led from the front and were the first over the parapet. Entire graduating classes from Oxford and Cambridge were wiped out. The social and cultural consequences of this loss were profound: a generation of potential leaders, artists, and thinkers was destroyed or damaged. It is worth noting, however, that the phrase "lost generation" is itself a construction of the aftermath — a way of shaping mass bereavement into a memorable, almost literary idea — and historians have questioned how literally it should be taken. The notion that Britain was deprived of its natural elite is itself part of the "Myth of the War" Samuel Hynes describes: powerful, widely felt, and not therefore simply true. For literary analysis the value of the phrase is that it names the structure of feeling — the sense of a cancelled future, of survivors haunted by those who did not return — out of which so much aftermath writing, from Brittain's memoir to Larkin's elegy, is made.
The sense of a "lost generation" pervades post-war literature:
| Expression | Text |
|---|---|
| "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old" | Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen" (1914) — the most quoted lines of any war poem, read annually at Remembrance services |
| "In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row" | John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields" (1915) — the poem that established the poppy as the symbol of Remembrance |
| "My subject is War, and the pity of War" | Owen's draft preface — the definitive statement of the war poet's purpose |
| "We are the Dead" | McCrae's phrase, speaking as the dead themselves — the literary convention of the dead addressing the living becomes a defining feature of war literature |
The 1920s and 1930s saw a sustained literary effort to process and make sense of the war:
| Phase | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| The "war books boom" (1928–33) | A flood of memoirs and novels — Graves, Sassoon, Blunden, Remarque, Brittain. The timing suggests that approximately a decade of distance was needed before the war could be addressed in sustained prose |
| Modernism and the war | Modernist literature — Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) — was profoundly shaped by the war, even when it did not address it directly. The fragmentation, disillusionment, and sense of cultural collapse in Modernist writing are, in part, responses to 1914–18 |
| Anti-war sentiment | The 1930s saw a growing anti-war movement, fed by the literature of the previous decade. The "war to end all wars" had not ended war; the rise of fascism threatened another conflict. The "never again" sentiment was powerful but ultimately futile |
The war has never ceased to be a subject for literature. Each generation revisits it with different concerns and perspectives:
| Period | Concerns | Key Texts |
|---|---|---|
| 1960s | Anti-establishment sentiment; anti-war protest (Vietnam context); satire | Littlewood, Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) |
| 1990s | Gender, trauma, class; the approaching centenary; the last living veterans | Barker, Regeneration trilogy (1991–95); Faulks, Birdsong (1993) |
| 2000s–2010s | Empire, Irish experience, diversity; the centenary commemorations (2014–18) | Barry, A Long Long Way (2005); Sheers, Mametz Wood (2005) |
| Ongoing | Why the war still matters; how memory is transmitted between generations | The continuing popularity of war literature; Remembrance Day rituals; battlefield tourism |
AO3 Application: When writing about post-war or retrospective WW1 literature, consider the context of writing as well as the context of subject. Barker's Regeneration (1991) is shaped by late 20th-century understandings of PTSD, gender politics, and class — concerns that the original war writers could not have articulated in the same way.
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