Jay Winter

The story of 1 27

Cultural codes a n d languages of mourning Lieutenant Pericard, who called the dead to rise from their trenches and stop the invader, was told time and again during the war.

His original idea in the 1919 version of J' accuse was to make one of the heroes who dies in the war return and live with his widow and her new husband in a supernatural menage a trois.

The 'pillar of fire' - in Hebrew 'Shoah' - reverts back to the original Biblical meaning of holocaust, as a ritual purification or sacrifice

Beckmann developed a style both romantic and ironic, disclosed by his jibe to a friend that instead of serving in Belgium, he wished he could read Jean Paul on Mars.

5. It is this brooding melancholy, this soleil noir (in Julia Kristeva's phrase)

a purification by fire, a preparation through voluntary sacrifice of a better life to come. Holocaust was a form of aesthetic redemption: it gave meaning to the pain, the suffering, the loss of life in the war.

It is a splendid evisceration of the romantic glow of the early months of the war among those incapable of seeing that being enthusiastic for war is like shouting hurrah for bubonic plague.

Adding to the play's drama was another event of 1916. On 1 October, a German Zeppelin, the L-31, was shot down over north London. The day after, Shaw went to see the downed airship. Shaw had the honesty to admit that the whole incident had fascinated him. To the Webbs he confessed:

What is hardly credible, but true, is that the sound of the Zepp's engines was so fine, and its voyage through the stars so enchanting, that I positively caught myself hoping next night that there would be another raid . I grieve to add that after seeing the Zepp fall like a burning newspaper, with its human contents roasting for some minutes (it was frightfully slow) 1 went to bed and was comfortably asleep in ten minutes.

The dead must be served', 'we must not ignore the voice of the dead', became catch phrases in the effort to sell whatever politicians wanted to sell

The dead became a 'silent army'