isaaraujo

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war. The author Erich Maria Remarque was a German soldier in the First World War. All Quiet On the Western Front is his story published in 1928 in German. You are on the front lines. In the trenches and dugouts. In the bombardment. In the gas. Day and night. We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down – now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged. These soldiers are eighteen and nineteen and twenty. Some of them will have their whole life behind them before the end of the day. I am thinking, “Why do we do this over and over?” I wonder what others are thinking as they read of boys killing boys, bodies being blown apart. I wonder what the men who sent the boys out to die are thinking. The days are hot and the bodies lie unburied. We cannot fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do with them. The shells will bury them. Many have their bellies swollen up like balloons. They hiss, belch, and make movements. The gasses in them make noises. I wonder what my cohort of GR friends think as they read. They write: I’ve often thought that this book should be required reading for any politician with the power to declare war. Only a madman or Dick Cheney could send troops into combat after reading this. … I wasn't prepared for its art and its humanity, or for its widely applicable account of life's abuses of the frail and hardy human will, abuses which are almost a law of physics in World War I. … …a shockingly powerful book to this day which is not exactly the anti-war screed its fans claim it is, but rather becomes one by default for so unflinchingly detailing the random, utterly unglamorous brutality that comes with war. ... …an absolutely heartbreaking, wonderfully written novel about the permanent damage done to those who fight in wars … If this book has one message, it is that war is awful and young men ought not to be forced to fight them. … What man can truly understand war unless he has been through it himself? … It is not an anti-war book, but sadly only those who have been there can understand that. Not an anti-war book? Maybe just about man’s inhumanity to man? No, I think that this book easily qualifies as anti-war. But it does make me wonder what a pro-war book would be like. Easily four stars. Too bad we need books like this.

2022-09-05 20:11