“All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque
One by one the boys begin to fall…
In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.
I picked this up on a whim, worried it wouldn't be as good as I remembered. But I am happy to discover it’s just as powerful now as it was when I read it twenty years ago.
There is always a worry when revisiting a childhood favourite.
Artistic pieces - such as books, TV shows, or films - can have such a powerful impact on us when we are young. Often, this is because they are our first experience of a genre or topic in a way we haven't seen before.
But often it's not the work itself that was special, but the time we discovered it. Or while it was amazing then, in the intervening years it has been surpassed to the point where it no longer has any impact.
Luckily, All Quiet on the Western Front is just as powerful and fresh now as it was twenty years ago. And that’s no mean feat for a novel that’s almost a hundred years old.
Remarque’s writing is surprisingly modern. This may be due to the translation of course, but I have to assume it’s true to the original text.
What gives this work its timelessness is that it isn’t a story of idealistic youth becoming disillusioned by the truth of war. That has already happened. When we are introduced to the protagonist - Paul Bäumer - he and his surviving schoolfriends have been fighting for two years. They are veterans, incurred to the horror of everyday life in the trenches. Their youth has already been stolen.
This isn’t a history of any part of the war. It also isn’t really a character study, as there is no real growth or arc for any of the characters. Instead, this novel is about war as an experience and the effect it has on those involved. One of the main themes discussed is how Paul feels that whether or not he survives the war, his life is over. The years a young man is supposed to find himself have been taken from him. Even if the war ended tomorrow, he cannot see a world where he will have any identity other than the soldier he has become. He has been crafted into a tool of war, ruined for any other pursuit.
I will say the story can feel a little segmented. There are three main “sections”; Paul's life in the trenches, Paul visiting home on leave, and Paul recovering from a wound in hospital. The end comes on suddenly, without any real flow.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a classic for a reason. It avoids dramatics or sentimentality to give you a feel of the universal experience of the pointlessness of war. How - win or lose, survive or die - war ruins those made to fight them.
