Fleeting humanity:
Book Club selection shows war hasn't changed much

Shortly before Christmas, I happened to catch a story on CNN about a holiday event in a small town in Western Europe. After being liberated from the Nazis in World War II, the parents in the town had no means to do anything special for the children on the holiday. The American soldiers who had forced out the German forces put together a holiday celebration, with one even donning a bishop’s robes to play the local equivalent of Santa Claus. At the invitation of town leaders, that soldier has returned for many years to reprise his role.

Most of his fellow soldiers died days later in the Battle of the Bulge. To me, this story is an example of the dichotomy that is war. Even today, we often see images of American soldiers handing out candy to Iraqi children amid shots of violence and death. It seems that in every war story, we see, however slight, a glimpse of humanity that serves to remind us that there are people suffering on both sides.

Remarque

For our first selection of the new year, and our first book in a series exploring books that have been made into award-winning films, the Sunday Gazette-Mail’s Monday Book Club has chosen a classic novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque. Remarque’s eloquent description of war and the struggle of his characters to retain their humanity is a fine example of this dichotomy and the cost of such a conflict.

For those readers who are not familiar with the book — or the 1930 film, which won the Oscar for best picture — the story follows the experiences of a group of young German soldiers sent to the brutal trenches of World War I. The narrator, Paul Baumer, soon finds that the enthusiasm he shares with his classmates is destroyed.

Baumer and his fellow soldiers are quickly worn down by the bloodshed and disillusioned with their role in the conflict. They feel they are too young to have witnessed such atrocities, and by the end of the novel, Baumer feels that his war experiences have made him unable to find a place in the civilian world. He feels his youth has been stolen and questions the role he played in the killing: “I am young. I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”

I think our culture has largely been desensitized to the everyday reality of war, and so I was surprised by Remarque’s graphic descriptions of the battlefield and the fact that I found them so disturbing. Remarque’s novel is also remarkable because its themes and situations still ring true. Unfortunately, we haven’t changed that much since 1929, when the novel was published. The weapons are a little more sophisticated, but the act of war is still as ugly and devastating as it was over 75 years ago. As Baumer laments, “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe we are lost.”

The novel also offers insight into our current war in Iraq. And as Book Club discussion leader Carol Campbell pointed out in a recent e-mail, “there are a lot of comparisons to the present war in Iraq — most pertinently the youth of the soldiers being killed over there.”

Campbell plans to explore this connection at the Book Club’s first 2005 meeting on Monday, Jan. 31 at 6 p.m. in the Taylor Books art gallery. Other discussion themes include:

• The life-altering changes that come from the experience of war and being commanded to kill.

• War and culture. Soldiers from all levels of society fight together and are equally at risk. As Campbell puts it, war “levels everyone to some primitive or barbaric standard that wipes out divisions of education, etc.”

• According to Campbell, the characters in the novel experience “the reduction of all thinking to the mundane — where can they get some better food or dry socks? — there’s no time or energy to think of higher things.”

• Lastly, one theme Remarque strongly emphasizes throughout the novel is the relationship among the soldiers, which seems to “cancel out or supercede” anything in civilian life. Why is this important, and how does Remarque demonstrate the importance of comradeship?

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.