XII

It’s autumn. There are not many of the old lot left. I am the last one of the seven from our class still here.

Everyone is talking about peace or an armistice. Everyone is waiting. If there is another disappointment, they will collapse, the hopes are too strong, they can no longer be pushed aside without exploding. If there is no peace, then there will be a revolution.

I have been given fourteen days’ rest because I swallowed a bit of gas. I sit all day in a little garden in the sunshine. There will soon be an armistice, I believe in it too, now. Then we shall go home.

My thoughts stop there and I can’t push them on any further. What attracts me so strongly and awaits me are raw feelings – lust for life, desire for home, the blood itself, the intoxication of escaping. But these aren’t exactly goals.

If we had come back in 1916 we could have unleashed a storm out of the pain and intensity of our experiences. If we go back now we shall be weary, broken-down, burnt-out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no longer be able to cope.

No one will understand us – because in front of us there is a generation of men who did, it is true, share the years out here with us, but who already had a bed and a job and who are going back to their old positions, where they will forget all about the war – and behind us, a new generation is growing up, one like we used to be, and that generation will be strangers to us and will push us aside. We are superfluous even to ourselves, we shall grow older, a few will adapt, others will make adjustments, and many of us will not know what to do – the years will trickle away, and eventually we shall perish.

But perhaps all these thoughts of mine are just melancholy and confusion, which will be blown away like dust when I am standing underneath the poplars once again, and listening to the rustle of their leaves. It cannot have vanished entirely, that tenderness that troubles our blood, the uncertainty, the worry, all the things to come, the thousand faces of the future, the music of dreams and books, the rustling and the idea of women. All this cannot have collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels.

The trees here glow bright and gold, the rowan berries are red against the leaves, white country roads run on towards the horizon, and the canteens are all buzzing like beehives with rumours of peace.

I stand up.

I am very calm. Let the months come, and the years, they’ll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is still there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. But as long as life is there it will make its own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.

He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long – his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he was almost happy that it had turned out that way.

Afterods

It is now approaching seventy years since Erich Maria Remarque’s first major novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (literally ‘Nothing New on the Western Front’), appeared, first in a magazine, and then in book form, and we are eighty years from the start of the war – supposedly the war to end all wars – in which the novel is set. But just as the Great War of 1914 – 18 did not end all wars, but simply set the pattern for new and ever more mechanized killing, Remarque’s novel has lost none of its impact and none of its relevance; while Remarque himself, the centenary of whose birth is now not too far away, is gradually becoming increasingly accepted as a major German writer.

Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabruck in Northern Germany on 22 June 1898. His original name was Erich Paul Remark, but when he published All Quiet on the Western Front he changed his middle name in memory of his mother, and reverted to an earlier spelling of the family name to dissociate himself from a novel that he had published in 1920, Die Traumbude, about art and decadence (the tide of which means ‘The Den of Dreams’). It has not been published in English. Remarque’s name was not Kramer – Remark spelt backwards – even though this tale is still found in reference works from time to time.

Remarque was sixteen, then, when the First World War broke out, and he was educated – since his family was Catholic – at Catholic schools, and then at a teachers’ seminary in Osnabruck, until he was called up for military service on 26 November 1916. After training in the CaprivI Barracks in Osnabruck (which he transformed into the Klosterberg barracks in his novel), he was sent on 12 June 1917 to a position behind the Arras front. During the offensive in Flanders which began on 31 July 1917, and is usually known in English as ‘Third Ypres’ or ‘Passchendaele’, Remarque was wounded by British shell-splinters, and taken eventually to the military hospital in Duisburg. During this period his mother died. He stayed on for some time as a clerk in the hospital, returned for training to Osnabruck in October 1918, and was there when the war ended. After the war he completed his teacher training and taught for a fairly short time, then worked in various different jobs, including advertising, and in 1924 began working on a magazine called Sport im Bild (Sport in Pictures) in Berlin. In 1925 he married a dancer, (Jutta) Use Zambona, from whom he was divorced in 1931. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 (and burned his books, claiming that All Quiet on the Western Front was a betrayal of the German front-line soldier), Remarque went to Switzerland. The Nazis deprived him of his German citizenship in 1938, and in that year (the circumstances are somewhat difficult to determine, and reports of dates and details vary) he remarried Use Zambona so that she, too, could get away, though they seem to have lived apart. They were divorced eventually in 1951. With the assistance of his friend, Marlene Dietrich, he was given a visa for the United States, and left France in 1939 on the last transatlantic sailing of the Queen Mary before the war. He settled in America, spending time in Hollywood, and then New York. Remarque was a high-profile figure, and very much part of the Hollywood and the European emigre celebrity circuit (though he was unable to make close contact with two other famous literary emigres, Brecht and Thomas Mann). His close friendship with Marlene Dietrich continued, and his other exotic companions included Greta Garbo. In 1943, his sister Elfuede was executed by the Nazis, ostensibly for making defeatist comments, and presumably also for being the sister of the by then unreachable Remarque. The author himself said that she had been involved with the resistance against the Nazis, and was pleased when a street in Osnabruck was named after her in 1968. Remarque became an American citizen in 1947, and refused to apply for the return of his German citizenship on the grounds that it had been taken from him illegally. In 1948 he returned to Switzerland, and lived there much of the time for the rest of his life. He married the film actress Paulette Goddard in 1958. On 25 September 1970, he died of heart failure, and is buried in Switzerland.

Remarque wrote about a dozen novels in all, and several have to do with the theme of war and its aftermath, although none had quite the success of All Quiet on the Western Front. Many of them were filmed, sometimes with a script by Remarque himself, and occasionally with Remarque acting in them. The war novel was turned into a landmark of cinema history in 1930 by director Lewis Milestone and remains a classic; it enraged the Nazis, and Goebbels organized the disruption of showings of it in Berlin. A more recent colour version (1979) is somewhat less successful.

Remarque’s other novels include a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front called The Road Back (1931), which has a first-person narrator who is almost Paul Baumer brought back to life. Three Comrades (1937), which had to be published outside Germany, is set in the years between the wars, and after the Second World War he set another vividly imagined novel, The Spark of Life (1952), in a concentration camp. A novel of the Second World War which has quite a lot in common with All Quiet on the Western Front, and which was written in America, was published in 1954 in English as A Time to Love and a Time to Die, although the German tide actually echoes more accurately the biblical phrase, ‘a time to live and a time to die’. Set partly on the eastern front in the early 1940s, much of the action takes place in Germany under the bombing. It is a love story as well as a picture of war, and there is, running through it, the motif of the inextinguishable spark of life in man which is present in All Quiet on the Western Front, and which was used as a tide for the concentration camp novel. War and its results, the sufferings of ordinary people, the plight of refugees, but also the doggedness of that spark of life – these are Remarque’s main themes, and it is time, perhaps, for a large-scale reconsideration of his work as a whole, something which is underway already in Germany in the setting up of a research centre in Remarque’s home town of Osnabruck.

All Quiet on the Western Front is not a memoir, though of course Remarque drew on some of his own experiences in the war, and it is not a piece of historical documentation from 1918, though it is sometimes cited as if it were, but a novel. Remarque prefaces the work with a short statement declaring it to be an account of ‘a generation that was destroyed by the war – even those of it who survived the shelling’, and although the death of the narrator is reported objectively and briefly at the end of the book, the bulk of it portrays the war through the eyes of one soldier, albeit a sensitive one, the nineteen-year-old Paul Baumer. There are few military historical details, no heroics, and the real enemy is death. We hardly ever see the other side, and the very word ‘enemy’ is rare; Baumer refers to ‘the others’, or to ‘those over there’. And there is no expressly political dimension. Left-wing critics often felt that Remarque had failed by not having his soldiers’ revolt openly. But the soldiers in the trenches did not, by and large, mutiny or abandon their posts, and the only one in the novel who does so, Detering, goes home to Germany rather than desert to Holland and freedom.

Much has been made of the idea of comradeship in the novel, as something positive coming out of the war. This again is deceptive – it is in fact no more than an artificial solidarity in the face of adversity, though of course real friendships do arise, as is possible anywhere. Remarque made clear in The Road Back how quickly the artificial comradeship of the war crumbled away as returning soldiers settled back into different (and not always justifiable) social levels in civilian life.

There are in the work some particularly memorable scenes; although they are not always remembered as accurately as they might be, and critics all too frequently attribute to Remarque in 1928 thoughts that properly belong to his narrator, Baumer, in 1917. Thus the scene in which Baumer and his colleagues come under fire in what is actually a recent military cemetery – fluctuations in the front line ensured that the recent dead frequently did not stay buried for long – has sometimes been presented as grotesque gothic imagery. The incident in which the soldiers cook and eat a meal under fire, on the other hand, has been thought of as an adventure, even though Remarque lets his narrator introduce the scene by telling us how the soldiers habitually seized any opportunity for unusual physical or mental exercise, taking things as lightly as they can, to guard themselves against thinking too deeply about the realities of their situation. Only then does the actual ‘idyll’ begin – Baumer uses the word ironically because the whole proceedings are still dangerous. This is not the stuff of adventure stories.

The contrast of the realistic scenes with brief or extended speculations upon them by the narrator gives the work a narrative complexity that is not always recognized. Thus, on a superficial level, the beating up of the unpleasant drill-corporal is satisfying and memorable, but the narrator’s own thoughts take the reader rather beyond this when he underlines the real lesson of the incident: that the drill-corporal ought to have no cause for complaint, since he brutalized the recruits into the assumption that, if nations can settle their problems by violence, so can the individual. In fact, the final paragraph of that chapter takes the matter even further. The soldiers leave for the front in a state of relative (but only relative) cheerfulness, while an old man who is watching them refers to them as young heroes. Remarque strips the mythology from the idea of heroism.

All Quiet on the Western Front presents the war through the eyes and mind of one schoolboy-turned-soldier, but Remarque makes it clear that Baumer is a representative by allowing him to move frequently from the first person singular to the first person plural. Yet even this is by no means as simple as it seems, and it is well worth considering the variety and the precision with which Remarque lets his narrator use (or report other people using) the pronoun ‘we’. It can refer to the Germans as a nation, to the entire

German army, to Baumer’s company, to the ordinary soldiers as a class-group, to Baumer’s squad, or to a sub-group consisting of those members of the squad with whom he was at school. In Baumer’s thoughts it can also imply all the members of his age-group – the lost generation – and this can extend very easily to all the millions of young men in all the armies. Even so, the plural gives way at the end of the novel gradually to a singular again, when Baumer realizes that, now that most of his company and his immediate colleagues, even his close friend Katczinsky, have gone, he has to come to terms with things on his own.

Each chapter ends on a significant point or with a summarizing observation, and the brief but highly important concluding chapter of the whole book, which itself ends with Baumer’s death, is more complex than critics have sometimes assumed.

Much attention has been drawn to the statement at the end of the book made by the unidentified new external narrator that the dead Baumer looked peaceful, and seemed almost content that things had ended like that. However, just as for most of the novel we can see into Baumer’s thoughts, at the end an outsider is speaking who cannot see those thoughts. Thus Baumer only looks almost content, or if he were pleased it had ended like that. The narrator (and we) cannot know whether Baumer really felt that way because Baumer is dead. It can be no more than speculation. Indeed, Baumer had been forced, as the war was clearly ending, to acknowledge within himself a life-force which had not been suppressed entirely, and which would make him live on, even though he could not imagine what the post-war future would be like. In that last chapter – just before his death at the end of the war – his increasing isolation has forced him away from a collective soldier-view of things, however comradely, and even away from his own personal identity, to focus on this life-force, the spark of life that is in everyone, and which will go on, whether the individual wants it to or not. It is tragic irony that he falls at this point, and he must then be presented by Remarque’s new narrator in the third person, as an object.

For the later generations, the novel has lost none of its power. It presents within a small space a surprisingly broad picture of a modem, mechanized war, and whether or not some subsequent wars have been justified (or have been at least explicable), this war is understood by no one.

The novel shows us very clearly that war is something else: war is not about heroism, but about terror, either waiting for death, or trying desperately to avoid it, even if it means killing a complete stranger to do so, about losing all human dignity and values, about becoming an automaton; it is not about falling bravely and nobly for one’s country (‘he was killed instantly’ was usually a He), but about soiling oneself in terror under heavy shellfire, about losing a leg, crawling blinded in no man’s land, or (in those telling hospital scenes) being wounded in every conceivable part of the body. Baumer and his fellow soldiers discuss the nature of the war and war itself, but they do not come to any real conclusions – nor could they. They are too young, they lack the background. But their naivety, their very inability to articulate an answer is the point of the book. Baumer dies. The reader is left to draw the conclusion.