ABSTRACT
Disenchantment with war was the most rapid of the processes of disenchantment that forged the modern secular world. War was no longer an inebriating pagan god, but a statistical exercise in the technology of massacre. Criticizing the governments for the evils which had led to the war soon in fact became an empty exercise. At the end of the First World War, four of the massive empires which had fought in it had ceased to exist, whereas the number of independent countries on the map of Europe had greatly increased. Collective symbol had decreed the destitution of the father; but the fathers wanted to hear of no such thing, since at the moment of the decree they had been far away. Fathers who their children saw as heroes might have been able to offer them mental sustenance, and thus, to a certain degree, to make up for their absence.
