All Quiet on the Western Front (25 page)

Kat’s hands are warm, I pass my hand under his shoulders in order to rub his temples with some tea. I feel my fingers become moist. As I draw them away from behind his head, they are bloody. “You see——” The orderly whistles once more through his teeth.

On the way without my having noticed it, Kat has caught a splinter in the head. There is just one little hole, it must have been a very tiny, stray splinter. But it has sufficed. Kat is dead.

Slowly I get up.

“Would you like to take his paybook and his things?” the lance-corporal asks me.

I nod and he gives them to me.

The orderly is mystified. “You are not related, are you?”

No, we are not related. No, we are not related.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died.

Then I know nothing more.

IT IS AUTUMN
. There are not many of the old hands left. I am the last of the seven fellows from our class.

Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it again proves an illusion, then they will break up; hope is high, it cannot be taken away again without an upheaval. If there is not peace, then there will be revolution.

I have fourteen days rest, because I have swallowed a bit of gas; in the little garden I sit the whole day long in the sun. The armistice is coming soon, I believe it now too. Then we will go home.

Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings—greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims.

Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experience we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.

And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;—the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.

But perhaps all this that I think is mere melancholy and dismay, which will fly away as the dust, when I stand once again beneath the poplars and listen to the rustling of their leaves. It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the oncoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divinations of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.

Here the trees show gay and golden, the berries of the rowan stand red among the leaves, country roads run white out to the sky line, and the canteens hum like beehives with rumours of peace.

I stand up.

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.

————

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

All Quiet on the Western Front
is, by more than one measure, among the most important novels of the past century.

Its subject of course is epic: the so-called Great War, the seminal calamity of modern times, the incomprehensibly vast tragedy out of which subsequent, sometimes even bigger, horrors have continued to flow in wave after numbing wave, generation after generation.

And among the numberless works inspired by that subject,
All Quiet
has always stood virtually alone in terms of impact. Other writers approached the Great War either obliquely, using it as Ford Madox Ford did in
Parade’s End
as a black background against which to explore what seemed almost the suicide of Europe, or in bitterly poetic terms, as with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Erich Maria Remarque by contrast confronted it so directly, with such radical simplicity, that the result can seem almost artless by comparison. In the course of just a few months in 1927, drawing on his brief experience of combat as a teenage German conscript and the year-plus he spent in a military hospital recovering from
shrapnel wounds, he set down in plain terms the story of a fictional everyman, young Private Paul Baumer. It became an account, presented in raw and visceral terms, of how the war destroyed Baumer spiritually, stripping him of all hope of a future before finally, perhaps mercifully, taking his life.

The story first appeared in serial form in a newspaper, and for almost two years thereafter no one wanted to publish it as a book; possibly it seemed not just too journalistic, but to deal journalistically with matters about which German readers, at least, already had more information than they wanted. But when
Im Westen Nichts Neues
appeared at last between hard covers, it sparked an explosion that no one could have foreseen. Within eighteen months millions of copies were in print, and carloads more were rolling off the presses in twenty-five languages. Before another three years passed, the book was being burned by the Nazis, who found the depiction of a disillusioned and demoralized German soldiery to be intolerably offensive. Remarque himself being out of reach in Switzerland, the Gestapo had to content itself with beheading his sister.

Eighty-five years after its first publication
All Quiet
retains a formidable global presence, conspicuously in print and now in eBook format and in demand. It remains
the
work most closely identified with its subject—the first to come to mind, almost inevitably, whenever First World War fiction is mentioned. Its durability is explained above all by the fact that, from the day of its appearance, Remarque’s book has stood as an immovable boulder in the path of anyone wanting to portray what was arguably history’s filthiest and most utterly pointless war as anything other than filthy and pointless. People do continue to portray even the Great War in heroic and romantic terms, of course; they always will, the hunger for childish tales of glory being as inextinguishable as it is
rich in potential for profit. But they can only do so by ignoring the truth about a conflict in which for four years the young men of Europe huddled in holes in the ground and perished in storms of artillery and machine-gun fire in which blind chance, not courage or ingenuity or any other admirable quality, decided who would live and who would die. Death literally rained down (on average, fifty-five German soldiers died in every hour of the fifty-month-long conflict), killing and sparing the weak and the strong at random. And all, as would finally become undeniable, for nothing or less than nothing. That is the bedrock on which Remarque constructed his tale—the story, as he said, “of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

Timing was crucial to the book’s fate. If it had appeared soon after the end of the war, it would have been likely to find few readers outside Germany. By 1918, the year the war ended, years of relentless propaganda (in the United States, even prominent public figures were thrown into prison for daring to speak against their nation’s involvement) had made certain fundamentals appear to be unarguably true. That the war had happened because Germany set out to subjugate Europe and the world. That the armies of Germany, and by extension the German people, had conducted themselves in ways so loathsome as to disqualify them from the community of civilized human beings even after the destruction of their evil regime. That the Allied victory had been necessary to preserve not just democracy but civilization itself, and that the future of civilization would depend on keeping Germany crippled.

By the late twenties, however, such notions were growing threadbare, their consequences painfully clear. It was becoming obvious that the world the war had created—a world in
which Stalin rather than the Tsar ruled Russia, and Mussolini was making the trains of Italy run on time, and forces far darker than anything ever dreamed by any kaiser were emerging from the wreckage of Germany—was not exactly something to be celebrated. And that a novel in which ordinary German soldiers bore a startling resemblance to authentic human beings—to ordinary American soldiers, even—might not necessarily be a crime against truth.

There is nothing mysterious about the fact that Remarque’s impact has always been particularly great in the U.S. We Americans, in spite of our decisive role in the final victory, have always had a defective understanding of the Great War. For us it was a short, comparatively painless, seemingly glorious episode. Our troops did not enter combat to any serious extent until the German offensive of the spring of 1918, the failure of that offensive left Germany terminally exhausted, and the next six months became a process of hammering away with our superior numbers and superior matériel until a doomed but tenacious enemy collapsed at last. We were encouraged—were taught—to see the war first as nothing more complicated than a contest between good and pure evil, then as the redemption of a decadent Europe by “our boys” as they swooped in to end a deadlock that without their intervention might have gone on until the last man was dead. This was a naïve view of an unfathomable tragedy, a war that nobody had wanted, and its effects on Americans’ understanding of themselves and the world and their place in the world have been poisonous.
All Quiet
arrived here as an antidote to our national triumphalism and exceptionalism. To whatever extent it continues to serve as an antidote today, so much the better.

{March 6, 2013}