Naturally. The best for our soldiers every time, that goes without
saying." Paul almost seemed angered at the comment, for he cannot understand how
the man can say that the cities are worse than the front, but at the same time he just wants to be left
alone by people who have no idea what they are talking about. Harder still than the
misunderstandings, however, was the time Paul had to spend with Kemmerich’s mother, insisting
to her that her son had had a clean, quick death. Death was part of life on the front but
was out of place at home, and soldiers who had to be soldiers everywhere became something other
than men to deal with it.
Perhaps even more dehumanizing than the simple day to day violence of
the Great War was the advent warfare in which troop’s morale played little or no role in
battle. Wars in the past had often been lost due to poor conditions that made men fight
poorly. Napoleon’s greatest defeat before Waterloo was at the hands of the Russians,
and his men were simply too exhausted to fight a moving battle. However, in the Great
War the trenches were simply manned. Fighting took little effort beyond the bare
amount for survival. As a result a soldier’s morale was of little consequence, for no
lack of morale will keep a man from fighting for his life. In the same way, no excess
of patriotic zeal can hold a man together when hit by machine gun rounds or an explosive
shell. To the soldiers of the Great War, morale and tactics had been replaced by
survival instinct. To them life had never been other than what it was. Life
started when they had first come to the front, life was lived trying to survive the hells of the front,
and life ended in a shell hole at the front.
The very technologies that had created the need for the trenches, that
had in turn stolen the glory of war, that had vanquished the illusion of heroism, and had replaced
morale with survival instinct also stole from the generals all knowledge of practical
strategies. Until the great war, battles and wars both were mobile to some
extent. Often they were over an area of importance strategically or
economically. Loss meant a quantifiable loss of goods, winning meant an equivalent
gain. When two armies clashed, the fighting was almost always short- a matter of
days or even hours. For instance, the famous Battle of Gettysburg, in the American
Civil War, lasted from July 1st through July 3rd. This contrasts sharply with the Battle
of Verdun, a ten month affair in the Great War, which fought over a small creek bed in
France. Short battles didn’t necessarily lead to short wars, the Thirty Years War being
a notable exception, but rarely did they fail move about. The strategies that had been
implemented and honored with time reflected this mobility. The charge was one such
tactic. However, this rush toward enemy lines with the hope of breaking through like a
deadly serious game of red rover became a dying run with the advent of the machine
gun.