Again, on the question of authority, Baumer and his buddies were encouraged to enlist by Kantorek, their teacher. The chapter ends like this:
"What has Kantorek written to you?" Muller asks him.
He laughs. "We are the Iron Youth."
We all three smile bitterly, Kropp rails: he is glad that he can speak.
Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.
It's hard to appreciate, I think, how shocking this must have seemed back when it was first published, in 1929. We're used to this cynical stance now. Still, connect this to Baumer's disillusionment with authority in general because of the war, and you sense how much contempt the men on the front have for the people back home who think they're bucking up the troops, but who in fact are earning their enmity for their empty propaganda. The reality they're living is very far from what the people back home think it is.
I am wondering, though, how much this has to do with the nature of this particular war, as distinct from war in general. Unlike the Second World War, the Great War was fought over no great moral issue. It was unprecedented savagery to no transcendent end. The soldiers in this book despise their elders for committing them to this cause. I doubt that this kind of cynicism would have prevailed had soldiers believed in their cause. Which is to say, had they been sent to kill and die in a cause worth killing and dying for.
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Comments
Posted by Chuck Snakard @ 5:13 PM Mon, Jun 18, 2007
I wonder how much of that cynicism arose out of doubts regarding the cause. The French poilu was no less cynical, yet if any party had a right to feel justly agrieved, he did. Likewise, I suspect most of the soldiers from the UK felt they were in the right and the Germans in the wrong. I think Remarque hones on the the real cause of that cynicism--the way these men were abused by those in authority--bullied into enlisting, abused by petty tyrants during training, beseiged by foolish regulations, and most of all sent to fight battles in a way that all but guaranteed that most of them would become casualties. The British officer corps became known as Red-Tabbed Butchers for a reason. What the individual soldiers came to see was that war, especially this war, was not the glorious enterprise it had been made out to be. It was not dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It was dying of gangrene in a field hospital. It was all a lie.