Disenchantment

C. E. Montague's 1922 masterpiece, “Disenchantment,” offers a searing autopsy of the British psyche irrevocably altered by the First World War. Having dyed his hair black to enlist at 47, Montague dissects the war's insidious progression, from the initial, almost farcical, incompetence of officers drilling recruits for an obsolete conflict, to the bloodthirsty jingoism of a press that abandoned truth for propaganda, and the convenient theological contortions that made mass slaughter divine. He meticulously charts the moral corrosion that led to a post-war society consumed by a thirst for revenge, particularly among non-combatants, a predictable consequence of years of institutionalized hypocrisy and deceit that shattered all pre-existing societal boundaries, leaving a hollowed-out nation grappling for meaning.