Brian, thanks for your earlier comment about the memorial service in Ypres. It brings a question to my mind: given such memorial devotion, was WWI an altogether futile war, as some of us have been suggesting? Can anything that evokes or inspires that much dedication be called futile? I go back to Rod's note about why it is so forbidden to say "in vain" where a soldier's sacrifice is concerned. What does it mean that we can devoutly memorialize men who sacrificed their lives in a war that we can call, with just as much conviction, futile?
I also wonder if Remarque's fictional talent is leading us to a similar thing: even as we agree with Paul and his comrades about the uselessness of the war, we come to admire them more and more. Knowing them in a work of art makes them even more real and thus more admirable than if we just read statistics in a report.
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Posted by Chuck Snakard @ 5:53 PM Mon, Jun 18, 2007
Isn't there a micro and a macro view of the war? On the micro level, in the trenches with the soldiers, there was nobility, bravery, devotion, and honor--all the things that makes one hesitate to say those actions are in the service of something that has no value regardless of the side. It's interesting that Remarque does little to identify his soldiers as belonging to one army or the other. They are "universal" soldiers. On the other hand, there is a larger view that takes into account the reasons for the war and in this case, it's difficult to see what justification there was when is appears that the least bit of reason could have resolved the nominal issue of Serbian responsibility for the assasination. Also what we now know about what the war failed to accomplish--to create lasting peace in Western Europe--leaves one feeling that it was all for nothing.