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.

War

 

 

     War –what is it good for?  Absolutely nothin’!

                                            The Temptations, 1969

      Somebody please stop that war now.

    Jimmy Cliff, 1969

 

     So then why is it that wars have never ceased throughout human history and around the world?  Every day brings news from Gaza and the Ukraine of the suffering and waste caused by war, the toll in pain disability, and dearth, the rapid senseless destruction of what had been built brick by brick, the reinforcement of the most ignorant prejudices and absurd rivalries.  We scarcely hear of other armed conflicts which just now include fighting in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia.  For as long as written documents have existed, not only have people fought to the death, but valor in battle has been the most highly praised quality of men.  Patriotism has generally been lauded as a paramount value, its only competition being piety, with which it is often conflated.  I used to pass a Catholic school with the phrase “pro deo et patria” over the door, as though the young scholars were to absorb this lesson even before opening a book of grammar or mathematics.  To some it seems nationalism and piety are not merely compatible, but are virtually identical, as though Christ had not been undeniably and consistently pacifist.  Nationalism, by definition a tribal sort of sentiment dependent almost entirely on the chance of birth, is considered an absolute value.  Dissent during wartime is very nearly treason. 

     The acceptance and even more the celebration  of something as horrific as war implies deep-seated motives.  The aggression reflected in fighting is one of the most fundamental human drives, equal to sexuality in its power to influence action.  To kill another person is surely the most extreme way of exerting power, and the experience is applicable to nations as well as to individuals.  Whether Freud’s specific formulation of Eros and Thanatos is accurate in detail, one cannot deny that life is lived in the tension between love and hate, altruism and selfishness, cooperation and competition.

          In traditional societies the balance may be straightforward.  The individual must observe strict laws when dealing with an in-group while mandating no such standards in dealings with outsiders.  It is perhaps inevitable when resources are insufficient for people to fight over food, water, and land, but such conflict is today wholly unnecessary.  Current technology in both agriculture and manufacturing might afford everyone on earth a good standard of living were it  not for the selfishness that manifests in politics.  During the Irish potato famine, large amounts of food were still exported from the country as landlord’s profits took precedence over starving tenants.  Amartya Sen has demonstrated that all modern famines are caused not by limits in the food supply, as had happened regularly in the past, but are due to poor people’s inability to pay. 

     Violence itself will never vanish, but one would think that the large-scale savagery of war, in which an entire nation adopts the attack on others as its chief priority, might be eliminated.  After all, on the individual level, it is rare for a stronger neighbor to make off with a householder’s possessions, and, if such a thing occurs, the victim has legal recourse.  Since such arrangements have long been in place in civil societies, it is difficult to see why they would not be possible internationally.

     Should that criminal neighbor commit assault as well as theft, immediate resistance is justified.  Though Christ counseled turning the other cheek, people’s instincts urge them to fight, and such action would be all  but universally approved as moral.  If fighting in self-defense is acceptable, surely the same prerogative is available to nation states.  A similar rationale applies when a government is so exceedingly oppressive that its rule amounts to institutional violence.  The citizens of such a tyranny have the right to rise in revolution to overthrow their masters.  Invasion by another country, then, and extreme injustice in one’s own are the sole justifications for war. 

     Some combatants, whatever their ideology, are motivated by an attraction to the experience of deadly games.  The thrill of danger, the heightened nervous excitement of a frontline soldier, can be to some pleasurable and, indeed, even addictive.  Some find a sort of ecstasy in killing, a taste that might serve one well in a life and death struggle, but which is inappropriate in all other settings.

 

Some for love of slaughter in imagination,

learning later  . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter

                        Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

 

Those who are conscripted have no choice but to defend themselves as best they can and, in the end, the reluctant combatant is as likely as a more enthusiastic comrade to behave bravely under fire.  Such conditions, by focusing the consciousness on survival, reduce other distinctions to triviality and foster the closest relationships among people thrown together in extreme conditions by chance.  Such experiences are often among the most profound of a person’s life and, when losg past, may be regarded with nostalgia.  Fifty years after his service in WWII my father maintained contact with men who had been in his unit in France and Germany.  The intensity of wartime experience burns its traces into the brain of veterans, creating bonds between comrades and eliciting acts of valor and sacrifice from many ordinary people.

     Apart from the bonds formed under fire, of course, even a strongly anti-war stance cannot in justice deny the altruism of all veterans and the particular admiration due to wartime acts of courage.  For anyone who is not inherently bloodthirsty, the prospect of spending long periods in harm’s way, of delaying whatever one’s life goals may have been, usually suffering grueling material conditions even apart from constant danger, represents considerable hardship.  Since the call to arms is socially generated, the recompense must also come from society at large, and soldiers have, since antiquity, been lauded by their communities and awarded pensions and other compensation. 

     This social gratitude does not alter the fact that war, particularly modern war, is in general destructive to all combatants.  Everyone suffers, but positive consequences may follow the pain: the American Revolution overthrew control by a feudal regime, the Civil War ended American slavery, WWII defeated fascist aggression, and the Vietnamese finally ousted their foreign invaders.  Yet none of these victories was absolute.  Free from King George, Americans oppressed slave and native people, more than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, racism still permeates this country, Stalinist expansion replaced the Nazis in Eastern Europe, and North Vietnam gave little voice to the fighters of the National Liberation Front.  So who can do the moral accounting to determine whether a certain quantum of gain is worth the flow of blood?

     One cannot avoid attempting such calculation, inaccurate thought it may be.  All but pacifists accept that, unfortunate, even paradoxical, as it is, at times violence reduces violence.  The reckoning of when that is true is, however, a matter of opinion.  If a mass shooter is felled in the act of attacking others, who would criticize the gunman who brought an end to the killing with one final death?  A slave who turns on his tormentor and kills him would seem to most justified.  A Guatemalan who takes up arms against the massive institutional violence of an oppressive system has my support.  Yet, in dealings between nations, the imperative is rarely so clear.  I had no doubts, during the Vietnam War that the US had no right to be in Southeast Asia at all and that I would certainly not allow myself to be drafted.  On the other hand, I think that, had I been young in 1941, I would have felt that stopping fascism was imperative even if the cost be high.  Yet I will concede that thoughtful people differed about both these judgements, and I respect both those who conscientiously objected to military service in WWII and those who fought in Vietnam, believing themselves to be not imperialists, but defenders of the local population. 

     Neville Chamberlain is mentioned today most often to condemn his appeasement of Hitler but he spoke the truth when he said that “in war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”  Still, this statement ignores the possibility that there are circumstances in which one would be an even greater loser by failing to fight.  All anyone can do is to treat war as a highly undesirable last resort, yet judging when a given war is a “good” one must remain controversial. 

    

     

Nie Wieder Krieg! (Never Again War!) Kaethe Kollwitz

An Undercurrent of Pacifism in the Song of Roland

 

     During the Vietnam War, while I was yet an undergraduate, protected for the time by a student deferment, I recall speaking with a visiting lecturer, a British professor who specialized in Celtic and Old Norse literature.  Current events had brought him to a new view of the subject matter to which he had devoted his career.  “I realize now,” he said with soft regret, “virtually everything I have been studying glorifies war.”  He might have made his objection much broader: since the development of writing, martial valor has indeed been the touchstone for male excellence, as beauty has been for female. 

     Possible responses to this scholar’s anxiety might include the reminder that artistic representation of an action by no means entails endorsing what the fictional characters do.  Even if the persona explicitly expresses values other than the reader’s, this hardly justifies rejecting the text.  One need not accept Platonic Forms to profit from reading Plato, nor must one be a Roman Catholic to value Dante.  Finally, of course, people who have never participated in war are nonetheless certain to have had challenging experiences of other sorts for which military ventures make a fitting analogue or figure of speech.

     In an  interview conducted at about the same time as my conversation with the medievalist , with perhaps similar concerns in mind, Kenneth Rexroth maintained that every heroic poem contains, along with praise for the courageous warrior, “a profound condemnation of war” [1] as well.  In general, literature itself blossoms when employed to articulate ambiguities and ambivalences, and evidence is not lacking for Rexroth’s sweeping claim.  When Andromache pleads with Hector to avoid the hazards of fighting, he responds that his reputation demands that he put himself at risk.  Though he envisions her being forced into slavery, as indeed happened following the fall of Troy, her husband cannot turn from his duty.  This, of course, is a woman’s objection, but when Odysseus summons Achilles’ shade from the Underworld in the Odyssey and praises him for his distinguished career, noting that even in death he rules [2], the principal hero of the Trojan War tells his former comrade-in-arms he would rather be a poor but living man than lord over all the dead.  Here is a sharp critique of the pursuit of fame through combat.  Similarly, amid the heroics of Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, Falstaff punctures the illusion of the glory of combat with a perspective closer to that of Mauldin’s hard-pressed Willie and Joe.

 

There’s honor for you. Here’s no vanity. I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me; I need no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered. There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.  [3]

                                      

      A similar moment occurs in the Song of Roland, in the very conclusion where it might best influence the listener or reader’s impression of the whole.  Summoned to yet another combat, Charlemagne reacts with weary resignation.

 

Li empereur n’y volsît aller mie:

“Dieu,” dit le Roi, si peineuse est ma vie

Pleure des yeux, sa barbe blanche tire.” (ll. 4261-4263)

 

[“The emperor did not want to go.  “Oh, god,” the king said, “how painful is my life,” as with weeping eyes, he tugs on his white beard.”]

 

     While the placement of this image at the poem’s end increases its weight of significance, it is hardly the first anti-heroic passage.  Throughout the poem Charlemagne has been regularly depicted in such thoughtful moods.  Indeed, the beard-stroking is a leitmotif, the visible signification of his pensive attitudes, associated in general with his authority and wisdom, but numerous time the gesture accompanies distressed reflections of the suffering of war [4]. 

     What should the reader make of Roland the hero, given that Charlemagne, the most sagacious figure in the story, feels such ambivalence?  Roland’s judgement is far from unerring; his decisions are sometimes clouded by vainglory and impulsiveness (resembling in this the most courageous of fighters both on and off the printed page).  His nomination of his treacherous stepfather, who is also Charlemagne’s brother-in-law, for the mission to Marsile, which Ganelon takes as an attempt to do him in, is the origin of the story’s crisis, so Roland might be seen as inviting his fate.  Even in strictly military terms, Roland’s gallantry verges on hubris when he long refuses to blow the trumpet out of concern for appearing cowardly. 

      In the genre of chansons de geste Roland embodies a rashness in the face of death the very seriousness of which validates the hero’s indifference to consequences while Charlemagne represents the more mature judgement that peace, while less glorious, makes more sense.  I am reminded of Shel Silverstein’s 1973 country music song “The Winner” (performed by Bobby Bare) in which Tiger Man McCool resists a needless fistfight, recounting how his body has been battered by a lifetime of brawls and readily conceding “Well okay I quit I lose you're the winner.”  This leads his challenger, to whom he says, “you remind me a lot of my younger days,” to the realization that since “my eyes still see and my nose still works and my teeth're still in my mouth,” “I guess that makes me the winner.”  Machismo and sensible self-preservation are directly opposed, but only the elder’s cooler head can ignore the impulse to fight.    The tension between aggression and survival instinct is perennial and will continue to be enacted on the world stage as well as in song as long as rash youths like Roland pursue fame through violence.

  

 

1.  See Rexroth, Kenneth, "On Peace" (1966). Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers. 34.  Rexroth is not alone in this claim.  See, for instance, Caroline Alexander’s introduction to her translation of the Iliad, the first by a woman.

2.  XI, 485.

3.  (Henry IV, part 1, Act V, scene iii, ll. 35 ff.)

4.  See for examples, lines 215, 2930, 2943, 2982, and 3712.