Remarque’s World War I

 

     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 [1], 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 [2].  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 [3].  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 [4].

     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 [5]. 

     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 [6].  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 [7].  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.  Mailer, like Remarque, told compelling stories about the soldiers’ suffering, though neither had as much combat experience as many of their comrades.

2.  Andrew Sarris had it right when he said that Milestone “is almost the classic example of the uncommitted director.”

3.  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.)

4.  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. 

5.  The same passage, of course, which Wilfred Owen used in titling his unforgettable “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

6.  WWII, of course, had a more compelling case to make with the need to contain exceedingly brutal German and Japanese expansionism.

7.  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.

Notes on Recent Reading 50 (Greene, de Sévigné, Cary)

 

The Potting Shed (Greene)

     Greene’s plays are little-known compared to his fiction which, in the case of The Potting Shed, is just as well.  He attempted to write a tendentious piece in support of old Jehovah using the plot structure of a mystery, but succeeded at inspiring neither faith nor suspense.  The plot, concerning a militant atheist and an alcoholic priest, requires not only the suspension of disbelief necessary for all fiction, but a rather idiosyncratic view of Christianity itself.  To accept the premise of the plot, one must accept the idea that God miraculously restored James’ life in trade for the priest William’s faith, leading the former to a fevered search for the resolution of his own dissatisfaction while the latter stews in even more miserable wretchedness.  Christian and non-Christian alike might wonder what sort of a God would participate in such a deal, but I suppose this is a sacred mystery.  As a play-goer (or reader), though, one expects a more solid foundation to a work’s themes.  The hero’s tragic anagnorisis is managed with appropriate drama as long as one does not think about it much.  The enormous lion that appears in the closing image must surely be a close relative of C. S. Lewis’s Aslan, though his appearance here seems an artificial graft.

 

 

Selected Letters (Mme. de Sévigné)

     Reading Mme. De Sévigné’s letters one is brought into the world of the seventeenth century French court, but not the court alone.  She was acquainted with the chief writers and intellectuals of the day and delivers opinions of plays by Molière, Racine, and Corneille when they were fresh.  She was a close friend of Rochefoucauld as well as of woman writers like Mme. de La Fayette and Madeleine de Scudéry.  Still, despite its vivid recreation of its time, I found this collection unsatisfying.  Though these are genuine letters, full of gossip and news and emotion, they are not very artful.  The author turns out a nice bit of wit now and then (often a catty sort of remark), but most of the writing is formless and very often pedestrian (the Penguin volume I read translated by Leonard Tancock contained perhaps one quarter of the extant correspondence and might have been cut further yet in my opinion.)  The lady never ventures an original opinion which makes her an excellent source for historians but sometimes dull for other readers.  Most of the letters are to her daughter, living far off in the South of France and her intense maternal concern for her child, for her health in particular, and her delicate management of her son-in-law M. de Grignan, a man with a weakness for gambling and little financial acumen are fascinating at first encounter, but very shortly a bore.  The glittering Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné who frequented the court of the Sun King, comes to seem like a guest who stayed too long, blathering about her offspring until one found one was no longer listening. 

 

 

Prisoner of Grace (Cary)

      Though the novel is explicitly engaged with politics, the real thematic center of Prisoner of Grace is psychological.  Chester Nimmo’s every position is presented as expedient, as his real passion, his most strongly felt “cause” is consistently his own career, from advocacy for the Boers through pacifism and then patriotic support for WWI.  Thus the actual validity of, for instance, his denunciation of “baby-starving landlords” is never an issue; the rhetoric is a means for him to the end of political success.  likewise, Jim Latter’s defense of the Luga tribespeople seems merely an aspect of the errant quirks of that rather shallow individual rather than as either vindication or condemnation of colonialism.  Likewise, the defenders of the status quo like Nina’s cousin Slapton seem to espouse the politics into which they were born with little regard for rightness or wrongness, while Chester’s class consciousness seems like simple resentment of a piece with his pettiness otherwise.

     Nina Woodville is not only the narrator; she is the center of the novel, though she reacts to others and allows herself to be swept along by the current of her life, taking no decisive action.  Though even her love-making, with both Jim and Chester, is altogether passive, she is a fascinating character, as little in control of her destiny at the end as at the start.

     Along the way the reader is exposed to a good deal of history (wars, change of government, social movements) as well as developments like the introduction of lipstick among respectable women, but these documentary elements are consistently secondary to the psychological portraits, principally of Nina, but also of Chester and Jim on down to lesser characters like Aunt Latter and Bootham.