World War One (1914–1918) killed approximately seventeen million people and produced one of literature's most sustained and haunted bodies of writing — not only during the war itself but in the decades after, as writers tried to account for what had happened in terms that the available language wasn't equipped to carry. The formal innovations of literary modernism — stream of consciousness, fragmented chronology, the dissolution of the omniscient narrator — are partly a response to the war: a recognition that old narrative forms couldn't contain this new scale of industrial killing and the particular psychological devastation it produced.
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) is the foundational anti-war novel in the Western literary tradition, and it earns that status by refusing heroism entirely. Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier, narrates the war from the trenches with a flatness that becomes the style's argument: the compression of experience into survival, the loss of the ability to feel what soldiers are trained to feel. What Remarque understood was that the war's horror was not primarily in the violence — though the violence is rendered with unflinching specificity — but in what the violence required of the men who survived it: the systematic destruction of everything that had made them capable of ordinary civilian life.
Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, beginning with Regeneration (1991), uses the real figure of W.H.R. Rivers, a psychiatrist treating shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhouse Hospital in Edinburgh, to examine what the war did to men's inner lives. Barker is interested in the paradox at the heart of military psychiatry: the doctors were trying to restore soldiers to health, but health meant sending them back to the front. Her central patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, is at the hospital partly because he has published a statement refusing to return to the war, and Rivers's task is to convince him that protest is futile and return is necessary. The novel is a clinical examination of the relationship between trauma and authority.
Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong (1993) moves between the trenches of the Somme in 1916 and 1917 and a contemporary storyline in which a woman investigates her grandfather's wartime experience. The novel is best known for its tunnel sequences — the mining beneath enemy lines, the claustrophobia, the proximity of the men to each other and to death — and these scenes work because Faulks renders the physical reality of the war with a precision that prevents sentimentality. The contemporary frame is less successful, but it serves a purpose: it measures the distance between the war and the people who inherit its silence.
Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) uses WW1 as the setting for a love story, and what Hemingway understood — from his own experience as an ambulance driver on the Italian front — was that the war made certain kinds of romantic idealism impossible to sustain. The novel's famous prose style — the short sentences, the refusal of abstraction, the distrust of words like "glory" and "honor" and "sacrifice" — is a direct response to the war's relationship with language: the recognition that the old high-diction language of patriotism had been used to send men into conditions that made that language obscene.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) is not a war novel in the conventional sense, but Septimus Warren Smith, one of its two central characters, is a shell-shocked veteran whose story is threaded through a single day in 1923 London. Woolf understood that the war's aftermath was not confined to the men who had fought it but was woven into the texture of ordinary civilian life — the gap between those who had experienced the trenches and those who had not, the inability to communicate across that gap, the institutional violence done by medical authorities to men whose suffering didn't fit available categories. Septimus functions in the novel as the war's presence in peacetime.
Generals die in bed: Charles Yale Harrison's Generals Die in Bed (1930) is less widely read than Remarque or Barker but is one of the most unsparing accounts of the war written in English. A Canadian soldier describes trench warfare with a violence and a moral clarity that caused controversy on publication: the enemy are not monsters, the Allied officers are not heroes, and the soldiers kill civilians for reasons that the narrative doesn't moralize. The title's irony is the novel's argument: those with power in this war were insulated from its consequences, and those who did the dying had no say in whether it continued.