"All Quiet" -- finis
Friday June 22, 2007
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...
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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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 certainly think that is the case for Western Europe. Current-day Americans tend to minimize the impact of the first war because we came into it only towards the end, and there probably aren't more than 100 or so WWI veterans still alive to tell us about it. But if you travel to any town in France or Belgium, you'll see memorials to the local dead from both the First and Second World Wars. Invariably, the list from the first war is much, much longer.
As with the American Civil War we will never know what promising lights were simply pulled out of the gene pool by these wars. By some Divine Providence the men in my family first in Europe and later in America missed the wars even until now because they were either too young or too old to be pulled in. Not only are individuals spared but whole lines reaching into the future. And some are just lost and one wonders about the net effect. And perhaps abortion has the same effect,
This is just an aside. But there was story in today’s NY Times about the status of the new Joint Strike Fighter aircraft (F-35). The primary contractor, Lockheed Martin sees greats things in terms of revenue from this platform which will come out of foreign as well as US military sales. And the Air Force program manager who is a general is proud that the development is on schedule.
But upon reading the article, I thought to myself: Well the JSF is another instrument of death to be bought by countries that would be better off buying other, more useful things for their citizens. If the aircraft was not on schedule, in fact behind schedule for 5 or 10 or 15 years or fails completely, well so what? America military power could destroy any adversary with the weapons we already have. How is the United States any weaker because the Crusader program was killed? The only loser in a suspension of this arms race would be the Lockheed Martins and the other merchants of death. And frankly, that does not bother me very much.
Rod, I just wanted to say how much I've appreciated reading the book discussion blog--it's interesting, insightful and has made me think about the impact of war, both then and now.
It's been years since I've read "All Quiet on the Western Front," and I haven't had anything particularly insightful to add to the comments already there, but I did enjoy the exchanges concerning the absence of God (from the soldier's lives, that is) and the presence of a reversion to what almost seems like a pagan worship of the earth. In some of the passages quoted on the blog, the wind is "deliverance," and there's the eerie juxtaposition between the phrases "...we had taken no root. The war swept us away. .." and the later 'paean' to Earth with these lines:
"In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!"
It almost seems as though Paul has experienced a sort of rebirth in which the clay from which Adam was formed, and not the One who formed him, becomes the necessary object of worship.
I'm thinking I need to pick up a copy of "All Quiet" this weekend.
Your comment/comparison with Saving Private Ryan was interesting. I haven't read ALL QUIET, but as you know, I've seen the movie (1930 version - I also have the Richard Thomas remake), and I'd have to say that the scenes and sounds of the constant bombardment, the troop assaults, the pressure of staying in the bunker, and the episode in the foxhole with the man he killed, are perhaps grimmer and more war-loathing to me than anything in SPR, including the famous initial 30-minute assault on Normandy Beach. Maybe because ALL QUIET also captures the psychological effect, and not just the physical effect, of war. Pretty amazing that a 77-year-old movie is more effective than all of Spielberg's razzle-dazzle.
A number of historians have started renumbering the world wars--WWI lasted from 1914 through 1945 with a 20-year intermission; WWII was the Cold War, 1947-1991; WWIII is what we're in now. I find this persuasive.
Even more harrowing is Karl Krauss' "Die Letzten Tagen der Menschheit" (The Last Days of Humanity), if you are a real glutton for punishment. Stopping World War I has been the rescue fantasy of enlightened people since 1918. Ni modo, as the Mexicans say. It could not have been avoided; it was destructive in proportion to the success of the diplomats in postponing it until the opposing sides were equally matched in destructive power. The same was true of the Thirty Years War, the Pelopponesian War, and other wars resulting from balance-of-power politics.
The peoples of Europe desired it, and cheered its coming (except the unfortunate Austrians), and fought with a bravery and abandon unequalled in history -- including the Italians, by the way. At least for the first two years, that is -- then it stopped being fun.
The real tragedy is that Wilhelm II, a petulant and indecisive man, did not use the opportunity of the First Morocco Crisis in 1905 to launch pre-emptive war on France. Russia was busy with a revolution, and England would not have intervened. Von Schlieffen, the German Chief of Staff, advocated pre-emptive action but was ignored. Too bad.
What WWI teaches us is that a stitch in time saves nine. The contemporary analogy is to Iran. If Iran is permitted to acquire nuclear weapons, we will have wars in the Middle East that will make World War I look like a picnic. Recall that the Middle East already fought a WWI in miniature during the 1980s, between Iraq and Iran, with a million casualties. Better swift and brutal pre-emption now than a war of attrition beyond our capacity to accept horror.
See
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/middle_east/DJ29Ak01.html
and
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FJ19Aa01.html
and
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE02Ak03.html
Since I was extremely interested in WWI as a teenager, I read "All Quiet" with much attention. I now forget most of the details, but I definitely remember being moved by the attention spent on the humdrum daily events--like putting on that pair of good boots. The book really made war seem like hell, even apart from all the brutal death. The sequal, "The Road Back," is also a very worthwhile read, detailing the often unsuccessful attempts of veterans to reintegrate themselves into society. If you're every up for another depressing yet enlightening read, I'd suggest that one.
Also, you're absolutely right with your remarks about the importance of WWI. As a theology student, the war's particular important as the event that shattered the delusions of progress in European liberal Christianity and served as the launching pad for creative 20th-century theology as found in Karl Barth, et al. WWII is really just the aftermath of WWI, in a way.
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.
And you are how old?
You are a fucking idiot.
First, I appreciate the courage and humility it takes to publicly revise your views. That takes guts, and I admire it.
But --
Second, I know that Americans are kind of weak on world history, but can it possibly be true that you lived forty years on this earth and obtained an education without learning that war is horrifying, and that corrupt or misguided leaders drive their their nations into unnecessary, unwinnable wars?
If you placed all the books, pamphlets, poems, essays, and movies on this theme end-to-end, the stack would reach approximately to Saturn and back. Just two examples off the top of my head: Chris Hedges' War is a Force that Gives us Meaning and Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which should be required reading after All Quiet. They're both well-written, accessible books.
As you read Tuchman's book, the chest-beating nationalism and propaganda used by the various war parties will probably ring a few bells very close to home. Another lively exposition of the universal world-wide tendency of governments to start stupid wars, manipulate their subjects, and send young men off to be wounded and killed for no reason, check out Tuchman's The March of Folly.
Perhaps American conservatives live in such a sealed ideological bubble that they somehow aren't aware of one of the eternal themes of human existence. Fortunately, it's not too late to play catch-up -- your son still has fifteen years before he's draft-age.
Yeah, yeah war is bad for children and living things. Little babies in Iraq don't get to have their daddy rearrange their blankies. Daddy's been killed by death squad militias or captured, tortured and held by US troops in some godforsaken military prison. AQOTWF is a good read but one that seems required in a highschool literature class and not as important as your article portrays. Might I suggest a modern, more relavent book "Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq" It will make you want to burn a flag and get beat up at a public fireworks display-something that son of your's could be proud of you for someday.
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