War and sports
Chuck, you mention that the kind of comradeship that Paul talks about is experienced in sports by members of a team. I know what you mean, but it seems to me that being in a war is a different kind of experience because of the life-and-death divide. Team sports are in some sense a "mimicry of war," to use Virgil's term in the Aeneid; how much difference is there between the two in terms of their impact on the participants?
Again I'm thinking of Kemmerich, this time in Chapter 2. His death is agonizing, and we're not spared any of it from Paul's perspective: Kemmerich's skeleton "already working itself through," the orderly waiting for his bed, Kemmerich's tears, the utter isolation of his "little life of nineteen years."
But then when Paul is outside the hospital, he feels the reality of life: "Outside the door I am aware of the darkness and the wind as a deliverance.... The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone."
Is a contrast between life and death this extreme anywhere other than war?
Comments
You're right, Larry, it's not an analogy that can be pushed too far. I was reading ahead also. In Chapter 3 Paul and his friends reply to the question Rod didn't ask his classmate serving in Iraq: Although they agree there is a reason for the training, they object to the sadistic methods. And when given the opportunity, they exact their revenge on Himmelstoss. Having seen Himmelstoss in action, I found myself cheering on what sounded like a savage beating. Perhaps the reader (or just this reader) becomes just as desensitized as Paul and his friends?
Posted by: Chuck Snakard | June 19, 2007 12:50 PM
Commenting on the "education" of war vs. the rest of whay we learn in life. How does a person go back to being what he was before? I think that the answer to that question depends on what they were before, what they had to live through during the war, and what they came home to.
All three shape how crippling the "wound" is to the warriors soul.
I had an Uncle who drove an ambulance ihn Burma during WWII. To the best of my knowledge he never fired a shot in anger and was never physically wounded, but he was still wounded in his soul! How many men did he hold as they died, begging for God or Mom or just for the pain to stop?
He functioned for the rest of his life, but I believe and I was told by others that there was a very real wound in his soul.
Posted by: BJ Fletcher | June 20, 2007 11:09 AM
BJ, I believe the sort of thing that happened with your uncle must be unavoidable. I have a good friend who is still totally messed up by what he did in Vietnam. An interesting thing that Ken Burns said when he was in Dallas recently was that there seems to be some difference with WWII veterans, although he didn't say it was a hard and fast thing--that more of them seem to be able to live with their experience better than veterans of later wars. I wonder if the nature of that war (the "necessary" war) makes the difference
Posted by: Larry Allums | June 20, 2007 03:10 PM