(2) Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, p166.
(3) The Holy Bible, New International Version, Exodus 14:9.
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by Eric Corson
Since the earliest times, when Genesis relates the story of how Cain slew his brother Abel for jealousy, mankind has been at war. Furthermore, since very shortly after that time, war has been a way to accrue glory, to be honored for courage and skill. This has been the case in virtually every major culture in the world. In Japan, formalized hand to hand combat was born. The feuding lords would hire the almost legendary fighters to wage war against their enemies. In North America, the Native Americans fought small battles often. Indeed counting coup, where a warrior touched, but did not kill, an armed enemy was a way to become known as a great and fearless warrior. The North African Muslims created the jihad, commonly translated ‘holy war’, in which a soldier’s soul even if burdened with unforgiven sins traveled immediately to heaven upon death. The Gauls, in northern Europe at the time of Rome believed that a man could only reach paradise if he died in battle. In ancient Greece, military training was polished, until the phalanxes of Grecian hoplite soldiers were well known across the Mediterranean region. Following in the Greek tradition was Rome. To be a Roman swordsman was to be part of the most feared military force in the world. All of these bespoke glory to the soldier, and honor, but the problem still arises as to what reasons there might be for honoring those who exist only to kill.
Erich Maria Remarque, in the book All Quiet On The Western Front, seems to address this issue, in the form of Stanislaus Katczinsky, who is described as "the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil"(1). This man's description, and later actions in the book, during which he proves to be a veteran soldier and an excellent leader, immediately bring to mind those ideas of a heroic soldier that have been ingrained into society. The earliest impetus for such concepts was the soldier who fought better than the others did, and whose skill with his weapon was such that he seemed impossible to kill. However, if this was the only way to gain heroic stature, the advent of archers and ranged weaponry should have decreased the idea of the legendary soldier-hero. They did not, but began to pull the qualifications away from simple skill to a more nebulous quality. That of luck. There were fighters in battle who seemed to be immune to the arrows and projectiles of the enemy, and who appeared to ride unharmed into enemy ranks, always to appear victorious. Certainly the movie industry has picked up on these figures, creating ever- victorious heroes to awe and entertain audiences. However, although luck and skill could sustain a soldier even in the mobile gun battles that began to emerge after the usage of gunpowder became commonplace, it had no position in the trenches of the Great War. Here Remarque highlights the reality of the trenches in a way that popular images of war tend not to. Katczinsky dies, struck by a stray bullet fragment in the back of the head. His death comes upon completion of a hard push to safety by Paul, the books main character. With this simple imagery, Remarque portrays how shockingly random the war truly was, a situation where men simply lined up to live or die by how the shells fall. Katczinsky was the veteran hero-soldier that Paul and his companions looked up to for the first three years of the war. He is the sort of soldier that popular mentality says should either never die, or go out with suitable honor and glory, saving lives or making a spectacular attack. However, there was no room for this in the trenches of World War I, and Katczinsky dies an ignoble death.
Also contained in All Quiet on the Western Front are Paul Baumer’s thoughts on how the soldiers survived the never-ending onslaught of death. They distanced themselves from the future and from home. Muller asked the other characters at one point, “What would you do if it were suddenly peace-time again?” (2) Albert cuts him off, saying that peacetime would never come again. On a global scale he was wrong, but for the soldiers who fought there was much truth in the statement. The majority of the classmates focused on in the story died. Tjaden, Kemmerich, Muller, Katczinsky, and Baumer all are killed, all died to shells and random bullets. For them it indeed never was peacetime again. Survival was a function of luck, and when a soldier’s luck ran out he died. The soldiers would try to avoid thinking about that by talking. They talked about everything- death, sex, whatever came to mind as long as it didn’t make them think into the future in any way. A soldier’s life consisted of the reserve camps, the front, and leave.
Leave was perhaps the safest part of the war, one of the few places where shells weren’t at the very least an occasional threat, but Paul Baumer finds leave far harder than his time on the front. The city was filled with people who were proud of the soldiers on the front, and who would never be able to understand what things were like there. Paul finds himself trapped into conversations with men who want to talk to a soldier, who think they know how to win the war. His old German teacher states that “Yes it is dreadful, but we must carry on [on the front]… Naturally it’s worse here. Naturally. The best for our soldiers every time, that goes without saying." (2) 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. Men could be mown down like grass. Never before had a well-organized charge been able to be consistently broken by an inferior force at such a distance. Another tactic that seemed more promising was a slow advance, another time-proven operation. Eventually an army could be forced up against a natural barrier, and then overrun. One rather famous example of an entrapment like this comes in the story of Moses. “The Egyptians pursued the Israelites and overtook them as they camped by the sea,” (3) states the Biblical account. In that case there was Divine intervention and the people of Israel escaped, but when applied correctly, many armies had been broken. In the trenches though, barbed wire and shelling broke apart any slow advance. To continue to push the trenches forward simply required too many lives poured into the advance to be feasible. Another strategy was lost. As the war drug out over the years, the closest analogue to former battle strategy that could be drawn was that of the siege. Sieges commonly did take an extended time to complete. The taking of the city of Troy by the Greeks is recorded to have taken ten full years before Troy fell. The generals and leaders in the Great War were not prepared to fight a siege battle, especially with nothing to surround and siege. Since all of these tactics had broken into shards upon contact with enemy machine guns and shells, men on both sides of the wars simply dug into the earth, the best cover around. Once there they simply lay waiting to either kill or die.
The Great War, World War I, The War to End All Wars; many names given to the same conflict. A conflict that was a bloody confrontation both between the major powers of Europe, and eventually the whole globe, as well as a collision between the past and future, between men and technology. The war was a killing field for millions, and the death of millions more toward ever being able to inherit the full benefits of the societies they risked their lives for. The very technologies that had helped create the promise of a new world of peace as the nineteenth century closed stole men’s honor, slaughtered heroes, and destroyed the hopes of a peaceful globe as the twentieth century dawned. Perhaps there could have been no more fitting epitaph for Paul Baumer, symbol of the young soldiers in the war, than follows: “Grown old while young, he died while no one was watching.”
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