I read this book as part of my WW1&2 reading list and thought it deserved its classic status. Incidentally, I learned while reading Adam Fergusson’s ‘When Money Dies’ that this book was banned in post WW1 Germany as unpatriotic. According to George Orwell ‘Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations’ so perhaps something similar applies to war literature. It was also the case that ‘Death of A Hero’ by Richard Aldington was censored.
Throughout the book, I was surprised by how poetic it was and how much I enjoyed the prose. Given that I read an English translation of the original German text, I’m not sure how much of this is down to the original author and how much the translator (A.W.Wheen). Nonetheless, certain passages, like this one describing taking comfort from the earth, were very moving and well drawn:
“From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us - mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; she receives him again and often for ever.
Earth! - Earth! - Earth!” p55
Equally, when writing about observing prisoners of war from a distance when billeted behind the line, the language is both pithy and profound - ”but as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.” (p193) The prose has a simple and straightforward style but this doesn’t prevent it from being evocative. There were many instances when a phrase or paragraph struck me with particular force. For example, when writing about the sounds of wounded horses, they are ”wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.” (p62)
The book gave a pithy and unpretentious account of the experiences and emotions of war and battle. It also describes the brutal psychological after-effects of the experience and it is a theme that’s constantly recurring in one form or another.
Even in the boredom of endless waiting that trench warfare entails, there is the unrelenting threat of shelling. Based on this book and others I have read about WW1, this seems to have been extraordinarily heavy and must have wreaked havoc with the soldiers’ nervous systems as well as inflicting huge amounts of physical damage. The utter helplessness of those shelled is shocking:
“The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us, Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.” p101
Against this backdrop, it seems like the adrenalin and agency of offensive operations or combat might have come as a relief, however counterintuitive that may seem. The chance to escape the background danger of shelling for circumstances that are probably even more dangerous but, crucially, feel like they have an element of self-determination appears to have been a welcome change. Equally, Remarque doesn’t write of fury and anger towards the enemy. Rather it seems something more like a haze of self-preservation, fighting more against the fear of death than against anything like a clear conception of the enemy.
“We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves from annihilation…No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged.” p113
This life of constant threat and suffering, combined with extreme privation from comfort and mind-numbing boredom, seems only to have been endurable in a state of constant stimulation. Living on one's nerves more than one’s wits. In one sense, it is incredible testimony to the human ability to adapt to prevailing circumstances. It would seem more natural if a bunch of late teenagers, ripped from quoutidian German life and thrown into the horrors of war, had simply run away or committed suicide. I’m sure many did those things, but the majority seem to have endured it until they were killed or returned home injured. They lived on a mixture of comradery, nervous stimulation and denial. Even those who survived the horror cannot be said to have escaped unscathed or, perhaps, even to be counted among the lucky.
“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.” p138
In these extraordinarily strained circumstances, the soldiers seek out and scavenge what little comfort they can. Mostly, they take it from the fact that others around them are experiencing the same thing. The solidarity they feel with their peers is described with such intensity, perhaps because of the extremity of their circumstances, perhaps because it is all they have. As with their ability to adapt and survive in unimaginable conditions, it spoke to me about something fundamentally social in the human condition. That people can endure so much and place themselves in such danger out of some sense of ‘esprit de corps’. I found the following passage especially poignant and beautiful:
“These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, the most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness; - I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.” p212
The rare moments when the soldiers enjoy something that would be recognisable as pleasurable in civilian life are savoured and remembered with intense relish. Paul and Kat’s illicit goose roasting is probably the best example (pp 91-97) and it makes a stark juxtaposition with the tone and atmosphere of the rest of the book, as it must have done in the soldiers' lives at the front. A darker, but equally memorable, example of the men enjoying themselves is the story of how they beat up the officer Himmelstross. This officer had enjoyed abusing them during their training at the barracks and the men take their revenge lustily when he comes to the front (pp45-50). These bursts of prohibited pleasure amidst the suffering bind the men even closer together and the memories sustain them through the harsher times. The feast of two suckling pigs the men have while billeted in a village (Chapter 10) is of a similar type albeit it is interrupted by shelling. Like the comradery between the men, it seems like their pleasurable experiences are intensified by the horrendous circumstances.
There’s a good deal of acerbic criticism in the book and not just for commanding officers who give the men stupid orders or abuse them. Their former school teacher Kantorek, who uses nationalist and patriotic arguments to persuade the school leavers to sign up for service, is a prominent symbol of those who encouraged the war and its destruction of youth without personally exposing themselves to its horrors. Remarque seems to recognise that such feelings were common and even well intended around this time in Germany, but it doesn’t seem to diminish his anger.
“There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best - in a way that cost them nothing.” p12
Surprisingly, another group who are criticised are the French women the men meet and sleep with while billeted amongst civilians in chapter 7. Paul finds the experience almost too much of a contrast with their normal life to bear and describes his “desires as strangely compounded of yearning and misery” (p149). The adventure leaves him feeling unhappy and he is ultimately angry with his lover when he returns the next night and tells her he may not see her again because he is going on leave. Initially, he is almost afraid to tell her but when he does he despises her cool response. “If I were going up to the front, then she would have called me “pauvre garcon”; but merely going on leave - she does not want to hear about that, that is not nearly so interesting”. May she go to the devil with her chattering talk.” (p153) Here, I see a mixture of the kind of disgust Paul feels for people like Kantorek alongside his hatred of the fetishisation of war, which he experiences while on leave. In this instance, he is being fetishised himself - the soldier as an object of sexual desire. It reminded me of the extremely acerbic treatment women receive in parts of ‘Death of A Hero’. Aldington rails against the women who give white roses to men of fighting age who they encounter in civilian life to brand them cowards. This is very similar to Kantorek. Worse still, these same women, who will never experience the horrors of war themselves, not only encourage men to go but then lust after and lionise those who do. I think I remember him asking why women want to bear the children of the murderers with the most blood on their hands! Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic outlook and the women are more impressed by the bravery of men who go to war. However, I can still follow the logic of the point he’s making. I suppose the extremities of the soldiers’ experience would create all sorts of resentful emotions, perhaps especially about those who’d managed to avoid their fate but still encouraged it.
Doctors and nurses in general, and perhaps especially during a war, are normally depicted as more or less saintly individuals. However, in this book, as is probably the case in life, they are a far more mixed bunch. In chapter 10, when Paul gets hit with shrapnel and goes through the medical system, he tells of sadistic surgeons persuading young soldiers into unnecessary operations which leave them crippled and nuns who keep the convalescents awake with noisy prayers! This helped me form a more realistic picture of the variety of characters involved in the war and not just to see them all as the ‘war heroes’ nationalist nostalgia wants us to believe they were.
A theme which is familiar from ‘Death of A Hero’ is the feeling of no longer fitting in when back on leave. It’s as if the experience of the front has changed or broken the men so irrevocably that they can no longer function in civilian society. They walk through worlds they used to know, enjoy and love in a kind of daze of half comprehension. The scenes and people are recognisable from their past but they no longer understand them and even dislike them. It’s as if the war has opened up a gulf between them and the civilian world that they can look across but cannot traverse.
“But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it. I find I do not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world. Some of these people ask questions, some ask no questions, but one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about. They plume themselves on it.
I prefer to be alone, so that no one troubles me. For they all come back to the same thing, how badly it goes and how well it goes; one thinks it is this way, another that; and yet they are always absorbed in the things that go to make up their existence. Formerly I lived in just the same way myself, but now I feel no contact here.
They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes that is it - they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean.” p168-169
One way of interpreting this dazed detachment is as a form of psychological self-preservation. The ordeal of the war is too brutal to be considered or understood in a civilian context, or perhaps in any context at all. The men must avoid what might be too damaging to confront head on. But like the French girls who indirectly glorify the suffering and senselessness of war, Remarque points out how offensive this can be to those who have lived through it. Of course, during a war, the war itself is certain to be a major topic of conversation in the civilian world. However, for a returning soldier this could amount to a near constant reminder of everything he’s trying to forget. Yet people focus on it continually in a way he finds impossible to bear or comprehend:
“My mother is the only one who asks no questions. Not so my father. He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realise he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?” p165
Another major theme of the book was a depiction of war as the thief of youth. The men enrol in their late teens and early twenties with all the enthusiasm for life, hopes and dreams normally associated with that age. The experience of war crushes their youthful idealism and leaves them cynical:
“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 peoples 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?” p263-4
In a way which is redolent of Paul’s experience of not fitting into civilian life when back on leave, the men also talk about how the war has left them mistrustful of the world. There is a sense in which they long to return to it but, because the changes the war has brought about are so profound, are no longer able. War has ruined them, their lives and their ability to enjoy them. It is all the more tragic because they are so young. In this moving passage, Paul chats with Albert about their hope and fears for ‘peace-time’:
“When I think about it, Albert,” I say after a while rolling over on my back, “when I hear the word ‘peace-time’, it goes to my head: and if it really came, I think I would do some unimaginable thing - something, you know, that it’s worth having lain here in the muck for. But I can’t even imagine anything. All I do know is that this business about professions and studies and salaries and so on - it makes me sick, it is and always was disgusting. I don’t see anything at all, Albert.”
All at once everything seems to me confused and hopeless….
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.” p87
In a more general sense, the war is also portrayed as a laying bare of man’s fundamental cruel and violent nature. It may be that this plays a major part in robbing the men of their youth. Such cynicism usually takes longer to set in during life. However, the war forces them to face the plain fact of man’s most brutal and destructive instincts, removing the thin veneer that usually masks them in society.
“For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same. In himself man is essentially a beast , only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.” p43-44
Paul’s experiences after his injury also have a profound effect on him and he struggles to comprehend how it can be permitted. The contrast between normal society and war is hard to reconcile. How can the brutality of war be tolerated, and even encouraged, by a society whose stated ideals are at such odds with it? This seems to play a part in the moral and psychological confusion the book portrays so vividly.
“A man cannot realise that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.” p263
I really enjoyed reading this book and felt it was very well written and constructed. The narrative and characters are believable and there’s no attempt to overplay the narrative. The prose was clear and matter of fact with some beautiful, poetic passages. I would thoroughly recommend it as a moving, accessible account of the war. This is probably why it’s a classic!
