For contemporaneous writers on Debussy, the First World War presented a persistent problem, with many choosing to omit or minimise these years in their portrayals of the composer, or French music in general. Drawing on work in collective memory by Maurice Halbwachs and successive generations of scholars, I consider the ways in which such portrayals were constructed and speculate on the reasons for why they endured. This chapter presents three narratives and examines them in terms of the types of memory at work, the motivations of the groups sustaining these memories, and the actions undertaken by these groups to promote their visions of the past. Each narrative subscribed to a particular collective remembering of recent French music, while each was consistent in what it overlooked: that is, they all contributed to a general collective forgetting with regards to Debussy’s late works and the war years.