ABSTRACT
ALMOST half a century separates us from the years just after the 1914-18 war, a period almost as long as from the French Revolution to the repeal of the Corn Laws. It is little wonder that the early 1920s seem to belong to a different age from ours. But the change, so far as it can be dated, occurred as late as 1945. On a broad view, 1920-45 was an extension of the nineteenth century. The world between the wars was dominated, as the nineteenth century had been, by the rivalries of European powers; and the war which broke out in 1939 was caused, like that which broke out in 1914, by the seemingly interminable struggle for political and economic power which went on between France, Germany, Great Britain and Russia. In or about 1945 the situation fundamentally altered. It was then that the greatest French poet of the time could write:
