![]() Particularly in Western societies, many who had survived the war could feel optimism that their future would be brighter than the past for many others, particularly in societies in Eastern Europe that had been ripped apart, the postwar world appeared anything but bright. This essay is entitled “postwar societies”, which is intended to signal the complexity, diversity, and often contradictory nature of social transformations in the wake of the First World War. For them, the First World War was a watershed, an upheaval of unprecedented proportions, after which nothing would be the same again. ![]() In making this speech – an attempt to encourage Scottish trade unionists to support the war effort and not to strike – Lloyd George memorably described the cataclysmic, revolutionary effect that the war was seen to have on the societies of combatant countries. It is one of those seismic disturbances in which nations leap forward or fall backward generations in a single bound. It is an earthquake which is upheaving the very rocks of European life. It is a cyclone which is tearing up by the roots the ornamental plants of modern society and wrecking some of the flimsy trestle bridges of modern civilization. ![]() Speaking to a crowd of some 3,000 shop stewards and trade union officials in Glasgow on Christmas morning of 1915, the United Kingdom Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George (1863-1945) famously proclaimed that the Great War “is not a passing shower – it is a deluge”: ![]()
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