Victor Davis Hanson on war on National Review Online Culture is not immune to the ripples of battle. The accelerators of Modernism were Verdun and the Somme. Perhaps the present brand of Postmodernism was born in France after the inexplicable and humiliating German romp through the Ardennes in 1940. The crater in New York at the very epicenter of American arts and letters will have a similar, if not more profound, effect.