1914 Goodbye to All That: Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art review – war reimagined from different vantage points

An international group of essayists consider our awkward obsession with commemorating war

Wilfred Owen was 25 when he died, on 4 November 1918. His poems were little known during his lifetime. Photograph: Alamy

The mantra of first world war anniversaries has always had an undertone of moral blackmail: "lest we forget" implies that if we don't remember the past we'll be condemned to repeat it, which of course is what happened when the shaky peace of 1918 broke down in 1939. But for how long can we go on ritualistically commemorating a war that began a century ago?

Goodbye to All That, the title of Robert Graves' memoir about the squalor and agony of the Somme, bade good riddance to the lying pomp of patriotism and military glory, which perished in the trenches. Taken up by Lavinia Greenlaw as a subtitle for this book of essays, the phrase sounds more like a rebuke to our comfortable historical amnesia.

One of Greenlaw's contributors, the Slovenian poet Alex Steger, notes how relieved we are to see the depleted ranks of second world war veterans, recently wheeled out for the 70th anniversary of the D-day landings: anxious for oblivion, we "can hardly wait for the remaining witnesses to die off". In Turkey, as the novelist Elif Shafak reports, erasure of the past began as a governmental mandate. The modern state established in 1923 outlawed Ottoman Turkish and its Arabic script, and created "a society that cannot read the tombstones of its ancestors".

Unearthing a silenced past, a global gathering of essayists here reimagine the war from a variety of vantage points, vying to claim a priority in suffering for their own countries. Ali Smith calculates that, among the 17 million soldiers and civilians killed between 1914 and 1918, "the Scottish Highlands had the highest casualty rate, per capita, of the whole of Europe", while Steger believes that "the greatest loss" was Serbia's. An Australian contributor, if Greenlaw had included one, might have made a special claim for the victims so casually sacrificed at Gallipoli. Jeanette Winterson, recruited to represent England, somewhat bathetically laments the damage to the British economy: a national debt of £750m before the war, rising to £6bn after it.

One of the most wrenching essays is about hapless non-combatants. Xiaolu Guo relates the forgotten history of the 100,000 Chinese coolies, who – with their pigtails lopped off and numbers replacing their unintelligible names – were sold to the British army as a labour corps and made to dig trenches on the western front. Guo's act of piety is a visit to a Chinese cemetery in France with a descendant of one of these slaves.

Elsewhere, the novelist NoViolet Bulawayo, brooding about genocidal conflicts in Zimbabwe, imagines "bones stirring in mass graves… as if they had heard their forgotten names" recited aloud, while the Belgian writer Erwin Mortier grieves for his grandmother's baby brother, who died of Spanish flu in 1918 and was probably bundled into a shared grave "in a shroud of bedsheets hastily sewn together".

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Greenlaw herself describes her grandfather who enlisted in 1914 with three brothers: "One was killed, one lost a leg, one was made deaf, and the fourth had his lower lip shot off." Was this a war or an abattoir, where, as Wilfred Owen put it, combatants were sent to "die as cattle", with no bells tolling as they were slaughtered?

For many of these essayists, thinking about the war is an exercise in empathy. Writers are apprentices to pain, and Kamila Shamsie dates her "moment of awakening" as a novelist to a childhood visit to an uncle in Pakistan, placed under house arrest by General Zia-ul-Haq. A woman Steger meets in Ljubljana asks him whether he has ever experienced "regression into past lives", and tries to persuade him that they have met before. "I murdered you," she tells Steger. "We were engaged when the first world war broke out", and she betrayed him. The incident spookily re-enacts the nightmare of Owen's poem Strange Meeting, in which an English soldier has a post-mortem encounter with a German who identifies himself as "the enemy you killed, my friend".

This tender, compassionate humanity is offset by a chilling reminder that not everyone hates war. After all, the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 excited artists as well as the gloating manufacturers of armaments: the Italian Futurists were excited by the "spiritual hygiene" of war, and Thomas Mann thrilled to its "mystic and poetic" allure. In Greenlaw's collection, the Austro-German novelist Daniel Kehlmann attends a magic show at which contemporary Berliners are only too eager to be duped and to obey absurd commands. Suddenly, Kehlmann understands "what makes dictatorships possible, and why people" (he means Germans) "march off to war and even rejoice as they go".

If all of us preferred peace, the world would be a quiet, uneventful place, with no market for Xboxes and the belligerent games played on them. That  alone should give us a reason to go on remembering remorsefully.