A Decade of Recovery: Europe in the 1920s

Even after the armistice and the peace treaties, the wartime spirit endured. Towns and villages built their monuments to the fallen, and battlefield tourism sprang up for veterans and their families in search of a relative’s final resting place. Words and phrases from the battlefield became part of everyday speech. Before the war the word lousy had meant “lice-infested,” but English-speaking soldiers returning from the trenches now applied it to anything bad. Raincoats became trenchcoats. Maimed, disfigured veterans were present everywhere. While some received prostheses designed by Jules Amar, others without limbs were sometimes carried in baskets—hence the expression basket case. Four autocratic governments had collapsed as a result of the war, but whether these states would become workable democracies remained an open question. The Roaring Twenties masked the serious problem of restoring stability and implementing democracy amid the grim legacy of war.