He nods.
The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I will not have one friend left.
“Kat, in any case we must see one another again, if it is peace-time before you come back.”
“Do you think that I will be marked A1 again with this leg?” he asks bitterly.
“With rest it will get better. The joint is quite sound. It may get all right again.”
“Give me another cigarette,” he says.
“Perhaps we could do something together later on, Kat.” I am very miserable, it is impossible that Kat—Kat my friend, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the poor, thin moustache, Kat, whom I know as I know no other man, Kat with whom I have shared these years—it is impossible that perhaps I shall not see Kat again.
“In any case give me your address at home, Kat. And here is mine, I will write it down for you.”
I write his address in my pocket book. How forlorn I am already, though he still sits here beside me. Couldn’t I shoot myself quickly in the foot so as to be able to go with him.
Suddenly Kat gurgles and turns green and yellow, “Let us go on,” he stammers.
I jump up, eager to help him, I take him up and start off at a run, a slow, steady pace, so as not to jolt his leg too much.
My throat is parched; everything dances red and black before my eyes, I stagger on doggedly and pitilessly and at last reach the dressing station.
There I drop down on my knees, but have still enough strength to fall on to the side where Kat’s sound leg is. After a few minutes I straighten myself up again. My legs and my hands tremble. I have trouble in finding my water bottle, to take a pull. My lips tremble as I try to think. But I smile—Kat is saved.
After a while I begin to sort out the confusion of voices that falls on my ears.
“You might have spared yourself that,” says an orderly.
I look at him without comprehending.
He points to Kat. “He is stone dead.”
I do not understand him. “He has been hit in the shin,” I say.
The orderly stands still. “That as well.”
I turn round. My eyes are still dulled, the sweat breaks out on me again, it runs over my eyelids. I wipe it away and peer at Kat. He lies still. “Fainted,” I say quickly.
The orderly whistles softly. “I know better than that. He is dead. I’ll lay any money on that.”
I shake my head: “Not possible. Only ten minutes ago I was talking to him. He has fainted.”
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.
The Enduring Impact of
All Quiet on the Western Front
An essay by G. J. Meyer
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 wit
h 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}
G. J. MEYER is the author of three popular works of history, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, The Tudors and The Borgias, as well as Executive Blues and The Memphis Murders. He received an M.A. from the University of Minnesota, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and later was awarded Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship in Journalism. He has taught at colleges in Des Moines, St. Louis, and New York, and now lives in Wiltshire, England.
Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. Kantorek the schoolmaster convinced Paul Bäumer and all his schoolmates to enlist, but Paul’s actual wartime experiences prove to be very different than expected. What effect do you think this had on Paul’s faith in the adult world?
2. As their comrade Kemmerich lies dying in the infirmary, Paul and the other soldiers gather around him to offer encouragement and comfort. But they’re also very concerned about who will get Kemmerich’s boots once he dies. What is the significance of this?
3. Paul muses: We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. What makes this so poignant?
4. What did you make of Himmelstoss’s treatment of the soldiers, and vice versa? How did Paul’s opinion of him change over time?
5. Paul imagines that even being back in the time and place of his happiest memories would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade. Those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spend together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not. What did you make of his alienation?
6. When Paul is caught in a trench with a soldier from the other side, he wants to help the man’s family after the war. But later, back among his comrades, he says: “It was only because I had to lie there with him so long … After all, war is war.” What does he mean by this?
7. What do you think Paul and his friends hoped to gain on their visits to the French women across the canal? Why is he so disappointed when he realizes that his brunette companion is unimpressed by the fact that she’ll never see him again?
8. Paul’s descriptions of the Russian prisoners of war show evidence of compassion. How have Paul’s attitudes towards the enemy changed over the course of the book?
9. What did you think of the ending?
10. Remarque’s second novel, The Road Back, is about veterans in postwar Germany. If Paul had not died, how do you imagine he would have dealt with the postwar world?
11. A hundred years after WWI, what has changed? What has stayed the same?
12. What do you think Remarque was ultimately trying to say about war?
BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Road Back
Three Comrades
Flotsam
Arch of Triumph
Spark of Life
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
The Black Obelisk
Heaven Has No Favorites
The Night in Lisbon
Shadows in Paradise
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE was born in Germany in 1898, and was drafted into the German army during World War I. Throughout the hazardous years following the war he worked at many occupations—schoolteacher, small-town drama critic, racing driver, and editor of a sports magazine. His first novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, vividly describing the experiences of German soldiers during World War I, was published in Germa
ny in 1928. It was a brilliant success, selling over a million copies, and it was the first of many literary triumphs by Erich Remarque.
When the Nazis came to power, Remarque left Germany for Switzerland. He rejected all attempts to persuade him to return, and as a result he lost his German citizenship, his books were burned, and his films were banned. He went to the United States in 1938 and became a citizen in 1947. He later lived in Switzerland with his second wife, the actress Paulette Goddard. He died in Switzerland in September 1970.
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