“Once and for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out. Neither side is glorious. On either side they're just frightened men messing their pants and they all want the same thing - not to lie under the earth, but to walk upon it - without crutches.” ~ Peter Weiss
As the evolution of human warfare evolves, so does civilization’s perception and understanding of its human realities evolve. When cavemen threw rocks, their civilian population was inundated with the glories and realities through stories and sagas. Today, we get up to date coverage and live footage ad minutiae when a burp occurs in modern warfare. Erich Remarque’s brutally graphic and realistic account of World War one, through the epic tale All Quiet on the Western Front, lies somewhere in the middle. Throughout the novel, he uses literary sights, sounds, and smells, to offer the reader a profoundly rare insight into the horrible human realities of the western front experience. Remarque brings these realities down to a bone chilling common denominator in his account of a face to face encounter between Paul and a French soldier; he uses this terribly sobering encounter, as well the poignant questions posed by Paul, to imprint the truly odious human reality of warfare in the mind of the reader. Remarque writes his literary masterpiece to give the civilian population a rare glimpse into the devastatingly tragic terror that is warfare sans la gloire de la guerre that so typically convolutes the perceived reality of all except the soldier.
The sights of real warfare are something quite beyond the reprehensible disgusts that are the sounds and smells of war. In and of themselves, quite rightly, the lot of these senses should and do have a civilian viewer rating far beyond unequivocally detestable. Earth, and its requisite mud and muck are the solace and deified sanctuary of the soldier; within her bosom the soldier avoids death for yet another moment. “To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier” (55). The otic pains of warfare abound, but the surrealistically deafening sounds of artillery can be mentally rendered into white noise. The cries of life, suffering, and dying, on the other hand, are intolerable. “…this appalling noise, these groans and screams penetrate, they penetrate everywhere…. We must get up and run no matter where, but where these cries can no longer be heard. And it is not men, only horses” (63). In this, the war to end all wars, both sides stay a relatively unmoving line—and for this line they die in trenches by the thousands. The artillery is solace to the sounds of dying comrades just within death and just beyond reach, but they do little to quell the stench of death. “…the smell of blood…. This deadly exhalation from the shell holes… fills us with nausea and retching” (126).
Righteous cause and the justification for violence are easily marketable from the viewpoint of the rear echelon (those behind the desk). But take death’s door, add two helpless grunts and a lonely crater where threat is no more, and the equation solves for “why are we doing this to each other?” Such is the case when Paul finds himself trapped in the crater with the Frenchman—his first and much lamented hand to hand kill. “Forgive me comrade…. If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother…” (223). Prior to this emotionally devastating and prolonged vigil with the man dying a slow death at his hands, the war and death were something of an abstract misery to Paul. Now it occurs to him that they never tell them that the enemies are, in fact, just “…poor devils just like us…” with anxious mothers, “the same fear of death…dying, and the same agony…” (223). The timelessness of this gripping scene and the questions he asks are a part of our human commonality. There is something life and soul altering that occurs the first time any human realizes they have taken another life for the sake of any cause. When Paul realizes the dead enemy soldier is the dead printer Gérard Duval, father and husband, war takes on new meaning.
Rarely will a soldier be able to confess the horrors of war without a steady flow of tears, but the same story told by anyone other than the soldier is invariably a diluted version of reality. What is an acre of land worth in terms of human life? Who wages war—the soldier or the politician? Remove weaponry and uniforms and stand two enemies beside each other; what is the difference between the two? Indeed there is a justification for violence, and no one knows that better than the soldier, but when a politician makes the call, the cost in human life should be necessary. Remarque offers an eternal reminder of the price in his depiction of “The War to End All Wars” through the eyes of the “grunt”.
Remarque successfully uses literary sights, sounds, and smells to offer the reader a rare glimpse into the hideous human reality of the western front experience. In his depiction of the encounter between Paul and the French soldier, we realize the tragedy of war and its meaning to the soldier. The politician or historian can not tell the truth of warfare better than the soldier; the politician and historian unavoidably sugarcoat with glory and nationalism the reality of war. The soldier has the real story that they would prefer no soft civilian ever has to see or know. It is just that odious. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front offers us a glimpse into reality without the veneer that we inevitably put on war to keep our own sanity. The soldier, politician, human, friend, and foe would do well to keep this book at hand and give it an occasional read when questions of war surface. The blind, emotionless numbers of war take on new meaning when we consider the price of war to the soldier. ~Joel Perry