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Conventional wisdom holds that a select group of World War I poets and writers, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen among them, forever changed the way we see war. In The Great War and Modern Memory (1976) historian and literary critic Paul Fussell argued that these groundbreaking writers transformed our perception of warfare from a heroic enterprise for brave soldiers to a disillusioning spectacle of waste in which youth are butchered by new and terrible technologies of death.