Synchronized Time & World War

Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 288.

The war imposed homogeneous time. In 1890 Moltke had campaigned for the introduction of World Standard Time, and in 1914 he used it to put into effect a war plan that required all the men to be in the right place at precisely the right time. In the prewar years wrist watches were thought to be unmanly; during the war they became standard military equipment. Before the battles wrist watches were synchronized so that everyone went over the top at the correct time. Edmund Blunden recalled how before an offensive a runner distributed watches which had been synchronized at field headquarters. The battle of the Somme began on the morning of July 1, 1916, as hundreds of platoon leaders blew their whistles when their synchronized watches showed that it was 7:30 A.M., sending the soldiers of the Their and Fourth British armies up the scaling ladders and over the parapet into no-man's-land. The delicate sensitivity to private time of Bergson and Proust had no place in the war. It was obliterated by the overwhelming force of mass movements that regimented the lives of millions of men by the public time of clocks and wrist watches, synchronized to maximize the effectiveness of bombardments and offensives.

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