THE first world war, or the Great War as it was known to contemporaries, still exerts an unyielding grip on the conscious ness of western Europeans, especially the British and the French. Schools organise regular trips to the battlefields and ceme teries of northern France and Flanders; the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sas soon are studied by every generation of English-literature students; nearly all the participating nations (with the exception of Germany) commemorate their military sacrifice on the anniversary of Armistice Day, November 11th 1918, when the guns on the Western Front fell silent.
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