You can't go on. You go on.
I appreciate the comments today about how life away from the battlefield allows us to see Paul's humanity more clearly. It is so kind of him not to wallow in his misery around his mother, to spare her his suffering. His compassion for the Russian prisoners, and their humanity in their shame and confinement -- singing and playing music -- was also striking. Did you notice how chapter eight ends? With Paul wanting to take all his cakes to the Russian prisoners, but then realizing that he should probably keep some back, because his sick mother had made them for him.
Paul has every right to think of himself during this time away, but he ends by thinking of the feelings of others. I think it must be that his time on the front has taught him the value of the compassionate gesture.
I'm reminded of working in Washington DC in 1995, and being assigned to be part of a journalistic team assigned to interview members of Congress who were serving under arms on June 6, 1945 -- D-Day, the 50th anniversary of which we were about to observe. I had lots of trouble getting these Congressional vets to talk. Sen. Howell Heflin of Alabama, for example, was virtually mute. Here was a man who had served in the Pacific theater with extreme valor (and imagine how bad I felt as a callow young fool who had previously only thought of him as Sen. Foghorn Leghorn), but he wouldn't talk about it except in the broadest terms. It was almost like he was embarrassed by it. I couldn't figure it out.
An older defense reporter explained it to me. He said that you find this routinely among WW2 vets -- a refusal to valorize themselves. He said that a lot of it is survivor's guilt. Plenty of men who were just as brave as they were, and even braver, did not survive.
In a way, then, the inhumanity of war rendered a lot of these men more humane. Maybe it's because life being so cheap on the battlefield, they came to value its preciousness in peacetime.
Are there any veterans reading along with us? If so, please let us hear from you in the comments boxes.