However, I went on to read it for myself anyways, figuring, who knows, maybe we'll read it next time. Dream do die hard, don't they?
I'm glad I did. It's pretty much canonical in historical fiction. Told from the perspective of a German soldier in World War I, it forces those of us whose sympathies obviously lie on the other side in this conflagration to confront the reality of the hell of war. And it is hell. No one wins in this novel.
Our narrator is Paul Bäumer a young, idealistic man who joins up, along with his pals, at the patriotic urgings of his teacher. Written in a haunting present tense that somehow enables the reader to simultaneously feel both part of the action and reflective, Remarque, through Bäumer, realistically describes the descent into inhumanity that characterized the War to End All Wars.
Bäumer begins his narrative in media Regan's, "We were at rest, five miles behind the front." And the action never stops. No explanations are proffered. The only introduction we are given is the names and a short bio of who, exactly, comprise the "we." But in fact, the "we" has already lost one member, obviously the one most reluctant to join. Although it seems clear pretty early on that Bäumer reproves Kantorek, the schoolmaster who impressed upon the young men their patriotic duty to enlist, for their current troubles, he assures us that, "Naturally we couldn't blame Kantorek for this. Where would the world be if it brought every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best—in a way that cost them nothing.
"And that is why they let us down so badly." (p. 12)
And so begins the penetrating commentary on war masked in the narrative of one soldier's experience. At a minimum, Kantorek should be given his due for his ability to teach his pupil the art of insightful writing.
While most of the book is written in the present tense, occasionally, Bäumer reflects back to the past. In describing how it was that he and his fellow comrades had gotten to the point where they could callously debate the means by which they could abscond with the boots of their dying pal before both they and his body were shipped off, he slips into reminiscing about the necessary training that shaped them. "So we were put through every conceivable refinement of parade-ground soldiering till we often howled with rage. Many of us become ill through it; Wolf actually died of inflammation of the lung. But we would have felt ridiculous had we hauled down our colours. We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough—and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training most of us would certainly have gone mad." (p. 26)
Much of the book is spent going back and forth between the terror of fighting and the absurd situations into which war necessarily places its participants. Vividly describing the bathroom habits of men forced to make due with the lack of latrines, grippingly detailing the death-defying trek to secure a treasured bird to roast, nonchalantly depicting horrifying injuries sustained on the battlefield, Bäumer time and again disconcertingly jumps from the daily banality of war to the carnage and its consequences.
"Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly. Yesterday we were under fire, today we act the fool and go foraging through the countryside, tomorrow we go up to the trenches again. We forget nothing really, but so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago. I soon found out this much:—terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it." (p. 138)
Remarque, however, will not allow the reader to duck. We are forced to confront the terror.
At one point, Bäumer almost succumbs to the thoughts he cannot think. He almost begins to see his enemy as a fellow human. He almost begins to see the absurdity of the fact that "a word of command might transform [the enemies] into our friends." (p. 194)
"I am frightened: I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss. It is not now the time but I will not lose these thoughts, I will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended. My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling; this is the task that will make life afterward worthy of these hideous years." (p. 194)
Again, the reader must think these thought. The reader is not in the trenches.
In a conversation among the men, they wonder at the futility of it all, "But what I would like to know," says Albert, "is whether there would have been a war if the Kaiser had said No." (p. 203)
From there they wonder just exactly it means that one country offended another. Can a French mountain offend a German river. Obviously it means that one people have offended another. Yet one soldier claims to have never met a Frenchman before the war, and that most Frenchmen have never met a German. How can there be an offense? Perhaps wars start because leaders need a war now and then to bolster their legacy. It is clear that these lowly infantry could never hope to comprehend the complexities which lead to international conflagrations. Yet, "no war at all is better" seems unanswerable. (p. 203)
Time and again, Remarque returns to the theme of youth and the impact of the war on the psyche of this generation. Bäumer begins the story by remarking, "Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption.They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We only know that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land." (p. 20)
Later, Bäumer and his friends begin to discuss the ramifications of the war on their generation. "Albert expresses it: 'The war has ruined us for everything.'
"He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such thinks no longer, we believe in the war." (p. 87-88)
Bäumer concludes, "I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?" (p. 264)
Indeed.
