The First World War brought to an end the period of remarkable creativity in modern painting, particularly in Cubism. The ghastly horror of trench warfare and the sheer scale of human destruction shattered for ever Europe's optimism and belief in inexorable progress. Rivers, as a doctor responsible for treating severely traumatised soldiers sent home from the battlefield, found himself at the very centre of the crisis precipitated by the war. This experience is widely acknowledged to have brought about a transformation in his own personality. Malinowski, however, was marooned on a Pacific island for many of the war years. He was engaged in the fieldwork which formed the basis for the principles of scientific ethnography he subsequently laid out in his ‘Introduction’ to Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). The sharply contrasting relationship of Rivers and Malinowski to the Great War is important in understanding the different ways of seeing which characterise their anthropological projects.