Points Summer Book Club

As we near the end of All Quiet, the absence of any encompassing or remotely satisfying answer to Tjaden's question "What exactly is the war for?" is overwhelming. Remarque and others like him would no doubt have gained some consolation if they had had recourse to a moral justification of the war that is killing them all. Going back to the death of Gerard Duval: when he gets back to his friends, Paul resolves not to say anything about what he's gone through, but he can't hold it in. How do Kat and Albert console him? By reminding him of some high ideal that they're fighting for? On the contrary, Kat directs his attention to the snipers on the fire-step of the trench who are picking off French soldiers, other Gerard Duvals, as though they were playing a game (the image recurs): "Did you see how he leapt in the air?" one sniper says. To which Albert replies lightly, "If he keeps that up he will get a little coloured bird for his buttonhole by this evening."

At such moments in the novel, one might absolutely thirst for a moral justification, but this is war at its utterly futile worst. Paul expresses it eloquently in ch. 10 from his hospital bed, which should be a place of healing before going home. Instead, he finds surgeons who care only about pleasing their superiors and sending them back to the Front. At this point the futility of the war reaches its peak in his mind as he looks at "the shattered bodies" all around him: "How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is" (p. 263). And a bit further on, "I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it [killing] yet more refined and enduring."

In a book skeptical of the values of civilization and education, this is the most scathing indictment yet. Does Paul mean that Western civilization could have avoided this irrational catastrophe, or that Western civilization carrried within it the seeds of its self-destruction, that such a high level of civilized sophistication must become blind to that which threatens it from within?

So what's left? I find it remarkable that the very next episode in the novel is the comic conspiracy to allow the wounded Lewandowski to be with his wife--screening, decoying nurses, baby-sitting, whatever it takes to allow Johann to "set to." Maybe I'm too eager to see a ray of light here toward the end, but I don't regard this as a desperate act on anyone's part, a kind of "last chance." Instead, there seems to a complete contentment and satisfaction at the fact that they have all played a part in creating something good, not only for Lewandowski and his wife but for themselves as well. "We now feel ourselves like one big family, the woman is happy, and Lewandowski lies there sweating and beaming."

Is Remarque exercising a little narrative cruelty on us here--giving us a glimpse of something before snatching it away in his last pages? I don't buy that, but I'm not sure I see how the passage works at this point in the novel. Any thoughts?