Vimy Ridge, France, April 1917, firing naval guns behind the Canadian lines. (Canadian Press/National Archives of Canada)

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Most wars are nasty, brutish and forgotten.

Ninety years ago a war ended that redefined brutish and is still not forgotten. In fact its influence has not only soaked into memory, it has changed the way we remember and respond to war itself.

The First World War dug a trench through history. All the dead from all the European wars from the French Revolution to its outbreak — that is, 125 years from 1789 to 1914 — amounted to less than half the dead in the four years it took to conclude what came to be called the Great War.

This was killing on a modern, industrial scale. Death in the democratic age.

It didn't take long before the participants grasped this fact. This was a war where soldiers came to expect death or a serious wound as a natural consequence of service.

There was an epic quality to the struggle in the trenches and the mud, a struggle memorialized by men, particularly British men, who went to war as soldiers and died as poets.

A poppy is placed on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa on Nov. 11, 2006. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

Homage

First in France and then in Britain the idea bloomed of creating a monument to the Unknown Soldier once the hostilities were over.

Each country set about it right after Armistice Day in 1918 and two years later, on November 11, 1920, each country buried its unknown soldier in a state funeral.

Italy soon followed suit. The methods were similar, the minor differences telling.

Each military hierarchy chose several anonymous corpses. In France, which had lost more soldiers than any of the winning allies, a sergeant bearing the wounds of combat chose the unknown man to be buried under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In Britain, a senior officer laden with braid made the choice. In Italy, it was a mother's selection.

The French departed from the somber script of anonymity by opening the tomb of Léon Gambetta, the French political leader who had led the last losing stand against the Germans in the war of 1871.

From his tomb, they took his heart and placed it next to the soldier of the trenches. The state funeral over, they returned his heart to his tomb.

Well after the last shot

The British chose to bury their soldier with a helmet, a belt and a crusader's sword.

Other countries copied those examples, some with some delay. Canada only chose and buried our unknown soldier 82 years after the last shot was fired in 1918.

The state funerals of unknown men were in sharp contrast to the custom of the previous century.

Then state funerals were reserved for heroic military leaders such as France's Napoleon or Britain's Admiral Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, the two men whose victories led to Napoleon's defeat.

As for the officers and men who died in battle — almost 40,000 alone at the battle of Waterloo — most were simply collected and dumped into common graves.

War graves

War graves and cemeteries were an American innovation, born of the bloodshed of its Civil War in the 1860s. The Europeans largely ignored this idea until the mass death of the First World War and then the British seized the initiative, creating the British War Graves Commission.

The writer Rudyard Kipling, whose son died in Flanders, sat on the commission and contributed the sentence of Biblical sonority — "their name liveth forevermore" — that graces these graveyards. Their ordered simplicity among trees and shrubs was a deliberate choice, designed to recall old English country churchyards.

Then came the monuments. The first of these was the Cenotaph in London, commissioned from the imperial architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

It was unveiled in 1920. The British government, deeply worried by unrest and revolution around Europe, saw the monument as a magnet to encourage patriotism and more conservative values. It appeared to work: in the three days after its unveiling, 400,000 people gathered to gaze upon it.

Monuments and ceremonies

This was the signal for the building of monuments to the dead — including the looming memorial to the Canadian dead at Vimy Ridge — on a scale not seen since the time of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, according to one British historian.

Monuments and ceremonies, the rituals born in the wake of the First World War are still those with which we salute the dead of today's wars, while the dead of yesterday continue to exercise a powerful attraction.

The British War Graves Commission has become the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and its officials note that the number of visitors to its sites in northern France has been rising substantially in recent years. The steady stream of books on the First World War, particularly in Britain, shows no sign of slowing.

In his book, The Great War and Modern Memory, historian Paul Fussell wrote that this conflict did more than reshape the rituals of death. It reoriented the psychological and literary outlook of a whole society.

Optimism was replaced by irony, the bitter irony of soldiers who fought and knew that their fighting was futile.

That irony was fed into the books written by men like Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Erich Maria Remarque. It became the template of war writing to this day.

Even the way we look at the world around us changed. Sunrise had been celebrated by poets for generations as a time of joy, innocence and new beginnings. But dawn in the Great War was when men went over the top, when battles began, when so many died.

"Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it," Fussell wrote. "The new, modern associations of dawn became cold, the death of multitudes, insensate marching in files, battles, and corpses too shallowly interred."

Just four years after that war's end, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land:

'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.'

So many undone by death. Among them Canada's Unknown Soldier, one of 128,000 Canadians who died and were lost in 20th century wars.