All Quiet on the Western Front
(Fighting Wars as Patriots)
Dr. John C. McDowell
[This short paper is an extract from a book I am working on which is currently being entitled Midnight Feasting: Christian Hope and the Deglobalising of Theology. It seems to me to raise some important issues concerning the nature of nationalistic patriotism and war-fervour, and so I have uploaded it in order to provoke thought concerning our contemporary crisis.]
There is little quite like a traumatic or crisis situation to encourage deep thought and the facing of difficult questions concerning authority and responsibility. So far my own traumas have been somewhat distanced, learned second hand through others. Relatively recently the gut-wrenching piece that harrowed my waking as much as my sleeping hours was Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 fictional (but is no less ‘true’ for being that) treatment of the harrowing experiences of a group of young German soldiers during WWI, All Quiet on the Western Front.
There is a scene that is worth citing at length since it, like much in the book as a whole, raises some important issues.
‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ continues Kropp. ‘We’re out here defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?’
‘Maybe both,’ I say, though I don’t believe it.
‘Well then,’ says Albert, and I can see that he is trying to drive me into a corner, ‘our teachers and preachers and newspapers all tell us that we are the only ones with right on our side, and let’s hope it’s true – but the French teachers and preachers and newspapers all insist that they are the only ones in the right. How does that figure?’
… Tjaden … [asks] how a war starts in the first place.
‘Usually when one country insults another one badly,’ answers Kropp, a little patronizingly.
But Tjaden isn’t going to be put off. ‘A country? I don’t get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a forest, or a cornfield.’
‘Are you really that daft or are you just pretending?’ grumbles Kropp. ‘That isn’t what I mean. One nation insults another…’
‘Then I shouldn’t be here at all,’ answers Tjaden, ‘because I don’t feel insulted.’
… [Kat] ‘…Why on earth should a French locksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it’s just the governments. I’d never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and most of the Frenchmen won’t have seen one of us. Nobody asked them any more than they did us.’
‘So why is there a war at all? asks Tjaden.
Kat shrugs. ‘There must be some people who find the war worthwhile.’
‘Well I’m not one of them,’ grins Tjaden.
‘No, and nor is anybody else here.’
‘So who, then?’ persists Tjaden. ‘It’s no use to the Kaiser. He’s got everything he needs anyway.’
‘No, you can’t say that,’ counters Kat, ‘up to now he hadn’t had a war. And all top-grade emperors need at least one war, otherwise they don’t get famous. Have a look in you school history books.’
‘Generals get famous because of wars, too,’ says Detering.
… He [Tjaden] walks off, proud to have got the last word over us high-school recruits for once. And in fact his views are typical enough out here, you meet them time and time again, and there is no real argument that you can put up against them, because they override any understanding of wider issues. The feelings of nationalism that the ordinary soldier has are expressed in the fact that he is out here. But it doesn’t go any further; all his other judgments are practical ones and made from his own point of view.
Of course, in the context of the story, and the fate of the group, we come to a shell-shocked realisation that the narrator’s [Paul Bäumer] concluding thoughts here are but glib refusals to face the catastrophe that he and his friends had been thrust into as a result of a wave of exuberant and nationalistic war-fever. On one occasion, when assigned guard duty over a group of Russian POWs, he reflects that
An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law. How can anyone make distinctions like that looking at these silent men, with their faces like children and their beards like apostles. Any drill-corporal is a worse enemy to the recruits, any schoolmaster a worse enemy to his pupils than they are to us. And yet we would shoot them again if they were free, and so would they at us.
Remarque’s is a very dark book, and its darkened mood is enhanced by the fact that while much of it takes place at night the real carnage is laid bare in all its darkness in full view in the daylight. The horror is to be faced without denial, and the narrator’s own moment of denial soon turns to the anguish of realisation, themes that mark many of the great tragedies. A key moment is set in a military hospital
It is impossible to grasp the fact that there are human faces above these torn bodies, faces in which life goes on from day to day. … How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like those are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren’t even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn’t stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.
I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world – my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? What would do they expect from us when a time comes in which there is no more war? For years our occupation has been killing – that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?
A great darkness had descended over Europe, and yet the narrator has been forced to watch in the full glare of the light. Nothing could ever be the same again for him. He is reduced to silence before his family when on leave – how could they ever understand? They have not seen the darkening of the hopes, dreams and desires of those at the Front, where living human beings are reduced to animals desperate for survival.
The book signals the beginning of suspicion – what we are taught is not necessarily true to the ‘way things are’, but are overlays that interpret these ‘things’ in ways that become natural for the believer. Only through the witness to an experience of something different could there be the formations of a suspicion that the story being told was not only much too grand but also destructive in its implications.