Points Summer Book Club

Yes, I agree that the book (so far) sets us up to identify completely with Paul and his buddies. Not having finished "All Quiet" yet, I don't know if Remarque has a surprise for us, or whether he intends for us to continue this close identification with the soldiers' attitudes.

On the "indifference to suffering," it's certainly a bracing judgment on what's happened to their consciences, but don't you suppose this is just a survival mechanism? Isn't this rather like the black humor that cops, paramedics, doctors and firefighters -- people who deal with intense suffering and death almost every day -- engage in to keep themselves ironically detached from reality, simply so they can function?

What's especially interesting to me about that dogfight exchange is the absence of nationalist feeling among the German soldiers.

You must be right, Rod, about its being a survival mechanism. Part of my point was exactly what you bring up--that the fact of its being a German pilot who goes down doesn't register with them one way or another. No sense of nationalism whatever; patriotism is an absent quality. I think again of the Wilfred Owen poem mentioned earlier by someone: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." It is sweet and pleasing to die for one's country. Again, an ultimate irony of war.

One of the main points of John Shay's "Achilles in Vietnam" (a comparison of the Vietnam War and The Illiad) is that in The Illiad fighting could only happen during the day and was thus more personal than the fighting at night in Vietnam. In "All Quiet..." we see a war that is so technically advanced that the inhuman, cold remarks of the comrades fit the style of battle they face. We learn later that Paul has a hard time connecting with his family when he goes home on leave which makes his detachment more pitiful. After that episode, Paul and his comrades debate the function and blame for war in the modern world. They reach the conclusion that "war is a fever." I think, under this reading of Paul, he is not responsible.

Good point, Mike. The day/night difference (which you see dramatically also in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War) is really elevated with technology. The airplane is so literally distant that it's worth little more than a small bet in terms of its "value" to the men on the ground; add to the literal distance the emotional distance, and what else can you expect? I'm still not sure about the aspect of responsibility, though. I think you're right to point to the long passage when he's home on leave with his family a little later in the book. I hope when we get there that we can look back to this part of our discussion.

Mike, that's an interesting point (and I want to check out that book), but during the first part of the war the combatants also fought in close proximity to one another. At some points along the front, the opposing trenches were only 10-15 feet apart. They were so close that the men could hear the conversations, singing and other sounds coming from the other trenches. It's difficult to see how they could overlook the humaness of their foes when they were co-inhabitants of the same spaces.

Larry asked: How are we to regard this "indifference to suffering." Is it excusable in this context?

I agree with Rod -- the indifference to suffering is a necessity for them to get through. When they are constantly surrounded by death -- the death of close comrades, dearer to them than their own families, in addition to the thousands of other countrymen they see exploding to bits around them -- how can we expect them to react with anything but indifference when a German plane goes down in the distance? It is not only excusable but necessary.