Like certain
other novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Erich Martia Remarque’s All
Quiet in the Western Front attracts the interest of people interested in history
rather than in literature. Though its
author saw only about six weeks of service in WWI before he was invalided out,
he must have kept a detailed journal. Like
Mauldin’s Willie and Joe cartoons during WWII and Mailer’s The Naked and the
Dead a few years later, his emphasis is on the physical demands on the
infantrymen. His writing style is undistinguished
and the narrative reads like straightforward reportage with very little
rhetorical elaboration, but that is precisely the point. This is testimony more than art and the voice,
that of Paul Bäumer, an average infantryman, neither a poet nor an
aesthete, seems utterly convincing. The
nationalism that inspired his enlistment vanishes in combat, leaving him with
overwhelming exhaustion and alienation.
The experience of
trench warfare is such strong stuff that figures of speech would only be
distracting. Ideology is equally
irrelevant. The book contains no recognition
of the issues that led to conflict, no praise of the Kaiser, no propaganda against
the French or English [1]. The intensity
of life on the front lines obliged combatants on both sides to pause their
patriotism and look directly at the dreadful face of war. Without partisanship, with only the most basic,
almost instinctive, humanism, the book found readers in many countries and was
translated into twenty-two languages within eighteen months of its original
German edition.
All Quiet in
the Western Front also inspired cinematic adaptations, notably Lewis
Milestone’s Academy Award-winning 1930 version [2]. During this era, anti=war sentiments were
sufficiently widespread to make box office.
Les Croix de bois, a film of a book by French veteran Roland
Dorgelès directed by Raymond Bernard was released in 1932. Other soldiers’ memoirs, such as Henri
Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916), Siegfried Sassoon’s The Complete
Memoirs of George Sherston (1928), and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All
That (1929), impressed many with the sordid horror of modern war.
Both film and book of All Quiet on the
Western Front were in accord with the Zeitgeist. With the use of trench warfare, aerial
bombardment, poison gas, and other innovations, the old codes of gallantry and
valor became untenable to many. The
Great War, called by H. G. Wells “the war that will end war” proved so horrific
that many vowed never to fight again.
The League of Nations was founded, albeit without American participation
(despite Wilson’s role in its design for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize) and
in 1928 the US signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact whose signatories promised to
forgo armed conflict altogether.
Upper-class British youth endorsed to Oxford Pledge “never to fight for
King or Country” and many thousands of their working-class brothers joined
them. American students in an effort
organized by the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the National
Student League organized a walkout to promote their version of the oath in
which twenty-five thousand students participated. Of course, with the threat of fascism and the
outbreak of WWII the Kellogg-Briand Pact meant nothing and virtually all the
British and American pacificists joined the war effort.
Milestone’s film
version, over two hours long, was startling in its realism. Milestone proved a significant director,
making such memorable films as The Front Page, Rain, Mutiny on
the Bounty, yet he was the ideal studio contract director, capable of every
genre and without a distracting distinctive style of his own. Remnants of early cinematic experimentation
are evident in some sequences such as the early montage of the students’ faces,
crazy with military enthusiasm, and the final lyrical image of Paul reaching
for a butterfly (an image absent from the book) but for the most part the direction
is unobtrusive, allowing the terrible mayhem of battle to register with full
force on the viewer [3].
The
apolitical pacifism of the novel survives into the movie, notably when the
weary trench fighters wonder about the origin
of such a monstrous thing as war and to conclude that the leaders of the
belligerent nations should slug it out in
a battle royal to decide the victor rather than subjecting millions of
recruits who have no motive and no desire to fight to senseless violence.
Their suffering
was so prolonged and intense that many were permanently damaged, diagnosed with
shell shock (or, in less serious cases, “effort syndrome” or “soldier’s heart”),
a disability little recognized in previous conflicts. Though his hero and Paul’s fellow students with
whom he enlisted did not survive the war, Remarque’s prefatory note suggests
that his primary aim was to account for the devastating psychic toll of combat
on survivors.
This book is to be neither an
accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an
adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell
of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were
destroyed by the war.
After suffering
life on the front lines, Paul feels alienated from his home town, distanced
even from his mother who cannot understand what he has endured (his father is
even more oblivious). Mental stability upon entering war is no
protection against serious breakdowns resulting from combat. In the U.K. over a hundred and fifty thousand WWI soldiers eventually
received psychological disability pensions.
The film, however, makes it clear that another cohort of young men is
prepared to ignore his witness and to continue to parrot the old lie, familiar
to students from Horace, that it is “sweet and comely” to die for one’s country
[4].
Remarque’s novel rang
true not only to his comrades-in-arms who had similarly suffered on both sides,
but to their families and friends. The
futility of war was particularly obvious in the case of WWI, the origin of
which was often explained as a combination of “entangling alliances,” imperialist
rivalries, and the profit motives of munition makers, causes unlikely to appeal
to the ordinary citizen [5]. As compelling
as pacifist arguments may be, humanity has never been without war. Once WWI had been declared the socialist
parties of Europe supported their governments in spite of the obvious negative
effects on workers, while in the United State Eugene Debs was jailed for
voicing his opposition [6]. The
popularity of Remarque’s novel and the film adaptation indicates that his
representation of the voice of an average infantryman resonated with others,
and the damage to fighters his book detailed was recognizable to many, both
veterans and non-veterans. With our experience
in Vietnam the same social harm is now only too familiar to Americans, yet
there can be no doubt that our governments will precipitate the same disastrous
suffering again and again in the future.
The thought of the harrowing accounts of veterans yet to serve, yet to
suffer, yet to be damaged is disturbing, yet without the testimony of ordinary
front-line combatants like Remarque the lies of governments would go
unchallenged.
1. Andrew Sarris had
it right when he said that Milestone “is almost the classic example of the
uncommitted director.”
2. A sequel to the
film, The Road Back (1937), was directed by the maker of Frankenstein,
James Whale. This in turn influenced
Howard Hawks’ The Road to Glory (1936).
During WWII Milestone made pro-war films such as The Edge of Darkness
(1943) and North Star (1943), the latter written by Lillian Hellman with
music by Aaron Copland, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and cinematography by James
Wong Howe.)
3. Milestone, an
immigrant from Bessarabia, now Moldova, born Leib Milstein, shed the
avant-garde techniques of early Soviet cinematography more rapidly than his
fellow director Rouben Mamoulian, who had been born in Georgia.
4. The same passage,
of course, which Wilfred Owen used in titling his unforgettable “Dulce et
Decorum Est.”
5. WWII, of course,
had a more compelling case to make with the need to contain exceedingly brutal German
and Japanese expansionism.
6. In the 1920
presidential election, while still imprisoned, Eugene Debs received close to a
million votes, the highest total yet achieved by any American socialist candidate.
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