Old Age and the Great War

In “1914: Peace,” Rupert Brooke welcomed the outbreak of the First World War as youth’s release from “a world grown old and cold and weary.” ¹ This juxtaposition of vigorous, unspoilt youth with old age grown corrupted, both morally and physically, remained a crucial motif in the representation of the war throughout its duration and after. It could be employed both to glorify youthful sacrifice, as Brooke does in this poem, and to condemn the senseless waste of young life by incompetent gray-haired generals, a view of the war which gained currency in its aftermath. Overall, British literature of the Great War is preoccupied with youth, which is not surprising, given that, of the five million men serving in the British army, two-thirds were under thirty, and that casualty rates in the younger age groups were highest. ² Therefore, it is striking that, in his war plays, J. M. Barrie, the creator of one of the most famous emblems of eternal youth, Peter Pan, “the boy who would not grow up,” focused on old age and aging. Barrie was fifty-four years old when the war broke out, and so, unlike Brooke and other “soldier poets,” was a noncombatant. His war plays concentrate on the home front and portray the entire spectrum of aged existence— the entry into midlife, more advanced age that is still active and independent, and increasingly vulnerable old age, with symptoms of senility—and relate those to wartime experiences that were shared by many on the home front—a son leaving home to go to war, his death, and, in the later stages of the war, the widespread sense of a fundamental disconnect with the prewar world. In Barrie’s war plays, aging becomes a lens for an intimate analysis of the challenges faced by a population that was divided along generational lines, with the emphasis on the less-commonly represented side, the old. Aging and old age also provide a perspective for the documentation and evaluation of the demise of the norms and values of the nineteenth century as a result of the First World War, allowing Barrie to reflect on Britain’s transition into modernity.