Getting started
Welcome to the first Points Summer Book Club. I look forward to our conversation about two great books on World War I.
We’re starting with a work of fiction, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which I first read back in the Vietnam era, in the 60’s when I was in college. I didn’t really appreciate it then but have come to admire its power and intensity in preparing for this blog.
I find it interesting that Remarque picks a young foot soldier as his first-person narrator. And right away he puts us into a present-tense mode, as though we’re hearing about things as they happen: “We are at rest five miles behind the front.” But of course we know that Paul is looking back on all this from some point in the future—ie, he’s choosing how to tell the story based on how his experience of the war has shaped him.
So it seems important to me to recognize the irony of the first few pages: they’re out of the fighting and getting their stomachs filled because half their comrades didn’t come back from the front. I think Paul (as well as Remarque, of course) wants us to have that kind of irony in mind with everything he says. War is, first and foremost, a great irony.
How did the beginning of the novel strike you?
Comments
Reading the first few pages of the book evoked an intense saddness. The war took something from the young soldiers that could not be replaced.
"Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land."
I think the author is describeing loss. Lost idealism, lost innocence. For although the young men try desparately to bring humor and distraction to the horror of their daily lives, the freedom, in some respects the right, of youth to be frivilous and make mistakes has been stolen. In the hellish combat Remarque describes, mistakes and frivolity will almost certainly lead to disaster.
Posted by: Cary Clark | June 18, 2007 01:39 PM
One of the things that struck me in the first chapter is how "old" these young men are at 19 years of age. They are jaded and desensitized by the war. They are overjoyed that the cook has cooked enough for a full company of 150 men, yet there are only 80 remaining after an intense shelling, so each man gets nearly double daily rations.
There is also the fact that they can recognize death coming to their comrade, Kemmerich, as he lies in aid station bed. All of them can see that he will not make it out of the place alive, and even Muller tries to talk him out of his fine English flying boots. Kemmerich has also had his watch stolen somewhere along the way, so we get the sense that the young men in these hoffific battles have been reduced to the level of vultures, taking their pleasures as the opportunity arises. Clearly these young men in the trenches are on the threshold of losing their humanity.
There is also a reference to an age-old complaint about war in the first chapter: that the lower classes have a clearer vision of what war is, because they often pay the ultimate price. Paul Baumer tells us as he refers to the boys' pro-war schoolmaster, Kantorek, "The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were besides themselves with joy."
All in all, the first chapter is a real eye-opener to the horrors of a terrible war.
Posted by: Doug Woods | June 18, 2007 04:10 PM