Horses and corpses
Horses and corpses
Remarque's artistry is at its best in ch. 4. At the end of the first section of the chapter, just after the earth passage Rod quoted, Paul says, "At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected." And a little further on: "We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers--we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals."
The "animal instinct" both leads and protects them--war not only destroys but reverses evolution or civilizational development, whatever you prefer to call it. If anything, it's pre-archetypal, aboriginal, even before any primal sense of deity. What a sudden demarcation: there's the Front, and there's everything else, every other aspect of human experience, I would think.
The mention of "animal instinct" precedes the first actual carnage at the front, which happens to involve not men but animals--the horses--and is described in gory detail. Between the framing images of animal instinct and animals destroyed, however, we get a different glimpse: "The backs of the horses shine in the moonlight, their movements are beautiful, they toss their heads, and their eyes gleam. The guns and the wagons float past the dim background of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely beautiful and arresting."
Remarque then lets enough time pass so that this image of beauty and nobility--such qualities as we might like to believe attend war--finds a place in our minds before the bombardment that destroys the horses. "'Wounded horses,' says Kat. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning." It reminds me of the barely endurable sequence of the horses at the end of Kurosawa's film Kagemusha.
At this point we do think back to the "beautiful and arresting" image of the horses and men moving through the mist and moonlight. All an illusion. We talked a little about the horses earlier; any other thoughts?