Chapter Four really got to me -- the sheer intensity of the bombardment, and the gruesomeness of the soldiers taking shelter in a graveyard that was being torn to bits by shelling. I was struck by the departure in Remarque's matter-of-fact tone in this lyrical description:
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us -- mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters hiim and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives hiim again and often for ever.
Earth! -- Earth! -- Earth!
Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!
This is the strangest passage of the book so far. Notice its frank paganism: in utter terror of death, Baumer begins to address the Earth as if it were divinity, because to him, Earth gives life. Notice too how "sustaining forces" pour into the men not from God, but from the earth. Pure paganism. I wonder: is this Remarque's commentary on how the experience of war destroyed faith in the abstract God of Christianity in the hearts of those who lived through it? On the other hand, I seem to recall that in late 19th and early 20th-century Germany, nature cults flourished in popular culture. Is this passage a reflection on that sensibility, and how perhaps something essentially Christian had already died in the hearts of those waging the war, which might explain why Europeans were able to give themselves over to such barbarism?
Anybody know?
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Comments
Posted by Larry Allums @ 12:19 PM Thu, Jun 21, 2007
Great comments, Rod. That earth passage got to me, too. It's uttered by Paul like a prayer to the primal deities; nothing "institutional" is possible here where there is no shred of civilized life, just attempts to survive.
They try to get so close to the earth that they're inside it, which so many of them will be soon. This anticipates the gruesome, ghoulish situation a little later when, as you point out, they find refuge in a graveyard and actually hide underneath bodies and coffins. Ridiculous--almost laughable: "I get a smack in the face, a hand clamps onto my shoulder--has the dead man waked up?" This is infernal comedy of the sort that Thomas Hardy has in his great poem that anticipates WWI, "Channel Firing."
I don't know the answer to your question about nature cults, but you sure make me think that the distance from what is happening in this passage to Europe's present spiritual state (at least in terms of institutional Christianity) is not very great at all.
Posted by laray polk @ 1:11 PM Thu, Jun 21, 2007
This descriptive passage can be read as a Greek ode or lament. The paganism you refer to strikes me more as archetypal, in the traditon of Mircea Eliade. In this particular instance, a remote sky god has little to offer to the shell-shocked. The obvious sexual references, the earth as a female body, however, offers sanctuary through entrance and embrace. For soldiers surrounded by explosives and bombarded from above, attachment to the earth--as neither below it nor above it, becomes the sacred space.