All Quiet on the Western Front

Here's the opposite of Twelve Days on the Somme.

Here are the rats – in crawling-over-your-face-while-you’re-asleep droves. Here is the ghastly trench fighting. Here are the drifts of rotting corpses in No Man’s Land and fatally wounded soldiers taking days to die. In agony. Here are relentless bombardments that last days. And go on so mind-numbingly, crushingly long some soldiers go mad.

Eric Maria Remarque didn’t actually serve all that long on the Western Front; he was wounded in 1917 and spent most of the rest of the war in hospital. He also never claimed that his book was a memoir; it’s a novel. A fictionalised account. 

But when I look at photographs of water-filled shell-craters, seas of mud, forest of shattered tree stumps, crumbling trenches and think that men actually fought each other – for years – in such conditions, I’m more than prepared to accept this ‘fiction’. 

Not that it’s all non-stop ghastliness. There’s a funny sequence in which a mean-spirited school teacher ends up in his local Home Guard, and is put through every training indignation possible by the young veteran he once so gleefully sent off to fight a glorious war for the Fatherland – but is now back from the front and in charge of… training his local Home Guard.

But then there’s also 14 days on leave, which ends with the narrator almost wishing he was back in the front line – because at least there’d be people to talk to who’d know what he’d been through. It’s a chapter more painful to read than the combat and rats descriptions.

100 years later, this is a still a very, very, very good book. And it must have been doing something right if the Nazis had to ban it and burn copies when they came to power – because they thought it defeatist and an insult to German soldiers. Not nearly enough heroic sacrifice for them.