Points Summer Book Club

After the graphic scenes of chapter 4, chapter 5 offers some breathing space both for us and the trench soldiers. It's an interlude of talking, and the talk is largely about the possibilities of life after the war. Muller leads the discussion as though he were a seminar leader in a class: "what would you do if it were suddenly peace-time again?"

Their first thoughts are to remember what they were doing when they enlisted--the idea of resumption, getting back to "normal." The most natural response? For most of them, being so young, that means returning to their schooling, but Paul says they "remember mighty little of all that rubbish." Education is supposed to be preparation for a productive occupation and a contented life. Kropp asks, "How can a man take all that stuff seriously when he's once been out here?" According to this, war renders education--the prime consideration in any civilized culture--useless.

The realization they come to in this interlude is that life after the war is unimaginable: "Two years of shells and bombs--a man won't peel that off as easy as a sock." The fact is that for them there is no longer any normal; as Kropp says, "The war has ruined us for everything." That caught me short; I think I expected him to say, "The war has ruined everything for us."

For Paul, though, Kropp doesn't put it strongly enough; it's even more extreme: "We were eighteen and had begun to love life and this world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."

Yesterday Laray made what I thought was an insightful comment in relation to Paul's lament to the Earth that he wanted to be taken into for protection: during the bombardment there is no above or below for the soldiers; they are caught in that single, thin dimension with nowhere else to go. For them, there is no height and no depth. Does that describe the existence of the soldier more generally? This matter of believing in the war: caught in such fighting as this, what else is there to believe in? This ties directly back to Rod's huge question yesterday: where is God during war?