Re: Differences between wars
Ken Burns, when he was in Dallas earlier this year, said that it's wrong to call World War II "the Good War;" rather, he said, it was "the Necessary War." It had to be fought, no doubt about it, but given what war is, it can never be called "good." That's probably what Remarque's getting at. We're just talking about the first chapter today, but the reader is plunged into a situation in which not only are the soldiers being robbed of their humanity by events, but -- and this is crucial -- they are being robbed of hope, which is really the worst violation. Hope is not the same thing as optimism. Hope is the conviction that no matter what happens, even if one dies or suffers defeat, that the sacrifice has meaning.
What we see in this first chapter of "All Quiet" are soldiers who are being crucified for a cause they no longer believe in, or understand. And this, I think, is an important lesson about war that this book teaches. War is, as you say Dr. Allums, always dehumanizing. But it seems to me that the worst thing about the Great War, as depicted in the pages of this book, was that all that death and destruction was for nothing.
That's why it's considered so taboo to speak of American soldiers dying in Iraq "in vain." It is painful enough to think that they're dying; it is intolerable to think that their deaths are for no good reason. Right?
Comments
RE: Difference between the Wars.
I don’t have the current under book under discussion yet, much less have read it. However, I have seen the movie up to the point where the German soldier is about to cut his leave short and return to his unit. I generally don’t like to read fiction because fiction usually combines several incidents into one to make a point and that blurs what really happened.
Fiction is also easier to write than non-fiction because fiction has to make sense.
I have, however, read a lot of non-fiction books on the two world wars and related subjects.
Some historians refer to the two wars as simply the Great European Civil War. Curiously the two great victors of this civil war were the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., two distinctly non-European nations. Great Briton lost far more than she gained from that civil war that ended in 1945.
I think it was Churchill who called WW2 the unnecessary war because there were so many times that Hitler could have been stopped by any reaction of the West prior to his invasion of Poland. The only reaction the West had to Hitler gobbling up the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland and then all of Czechoslovakia was appeasement.
The hope of the West was that the alligator would eat them last.
World War I was unarguably the great event of the twentieth century. It destroyed European civilization and the Old Order, which in some ways was more enlightened than the order than replaced it. For instance, passports and customs were not required for traveling and there were no controls on currency.
A previous post talked about the disillusionment of the soldiers. There were at least three army mutinies during WW1. The French Army went first after the disastrous Chemin des Dames offensive of 1917, the Russian Army mutinied which ended the Romanova Monarchy and the German Army mutinied which effectively ended the war.
Were there moral causes of the Great War? At least the French had one which was the return of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to France. Germany absorbed those disputed provinces following the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
The hero of the book we are discussing eventually talks with his Kameraden (nouns in German are capitalized) about why they are fighting.
I am currently reading the book “Europe’s Last Summer, Who Started the Great War in 1917?” by David Fromkin. The introduction to this book has a quote from John Keegan, author of "The First World War": “The peremptory transition from an apparently profound peace to violent general war in a few mid-summer weeks in 1914 continues to defy attempts at explanation.”
Barbara Tuchman also has some interesting observations on the start of the war in her books "The Guns of August" and "The Proud Tower".
Posted by: Richard L. Broberg | June 18, 2007 08:14 PM