"All Quiet" -- finis

Last night I finally finished reading "All Quiet on the Western Front," which we've been blogging about all week here. It was perhaps the most emotionally harrowing novel I've ever read. I had to fight through to the end; it was that intense. Remember how savage the opening combat sequence of "Saving Private Ryan" was? This entire novel was like that, at least for me. I'm thankful that I read it, but I hope I never read it again.

Seriously, I am glad that I read it, because nothing, not even the great "Saving Private Ryan," made me confront the existential issues present in war, and the combat experience of soldiers. The book is typically thought of as anti-war, and it is certainly that, but not in the way I had anticipated or feared. It does not make a case for pacifism. I suppose you could consider it an implicit case for pacifism, but the book is not polemical. The author, a WWI veteran named Erich Maria Remarque, simply writes about the daily experience of being in the trenches in that horrible war, and what it does to the bodies and souls of men given over to fight.

Having read "All Quiet," I think I understand now what people mean when they say that war destroyed European civilization, and killed the European soul. The experience of trench warfare as related in the novel was so brutal, so intense, and so relentless, that it annihilated the confidence many of the men fighting it had in Western civilization. Two bits of context are crucial: 1) the WWI generation had been educated by a European civilization at its cultural pinnacle, a civilization that, coming out of the 19th century, believed firmly in Progress; and 2) the war was not fought to Save the World from Nazism, or any such high moral principle. One imagines that the combination of these two factors, along with the unprecedented barbarism of the war, served to shatter these men. If the accumulated cultural wisdom of the West still led to that kind of slaughter, the thinking goes, what good was any of it?

I used to think the Holocaust was the signal event of the 20th century, and the permanent rebuke to the notion of progress. I still do -- but now I cannot understand the Holocaust apart from World War I.

I won't quote from the book -- if you have any interest at all in this, again, I urge you to visit the "All Quiet" book blog, particularly to read the incisive comments of Dr. Larry Allums, the literature teacher who is leading the discussion. There are plenty of quotations there, and lots of discussion about the novel's particulars. I will say, though, that the sense you get from the book is of the utter desolation of war. Many was the time I had to put the novel down while reading it, and silently repent of the way I had so thoughtlessly anticipated the pleasures of stomping the Iraqi military during the march-up to the war there. War we will always have with us, and there will be times when war is the only choice we have. But it must always be the last resort, and must never, ever be undertaken with anything but utmost gravity. It is a detestable thing.

I am glad that we will start having more Iraq war veterans in Congress.

One more thought: last night, as I was nearing the end of the novel, I heard my three year old son stirring in his bedroom, from a bad dream. I got up, went in to give him a drink of water, rearranged his covers and stood there watching him as he drifted off to sleep again. I looked at that beautiful boy in the soft yellow glow of his night light, and prayed to God that He spare my sons ever having to go to war. I woke up praying the same thing. But you know, we've got to do more than pray.