This remarkable novel conveys the true face of war in ways that no memoirs, no academic monographs, and no movies can. There is no romance in war, only mud, blood, starvation, and death. World War I was the war to end all wars, and it is quite appropriate that the Great War is the setting of this novel. Any idealism was quickly torn asunder by month after month, year after year of trench warfare. This is the story of one German soldier, a boy who was talked into joining the German army along with all of his classmates. At the front lines, Paul Baumer becomes a soldier. He and his buddies become primitive and animalistic because it is the only way to survive in that environment; thoughts of home or “the war” deprive them of the instincts they must rely on to avoid being killed. Baumer is philosophical enough to realize that he has essentially died inside, that every member of his generation has died spiritually if not physically and been robbed of a future. His trips home are perhaps the most painful days he spends; his family is living in poverty and his mother is dying of cancer. The emotions and feelings he takes back with him to the front are dangerous because they distract him.
As for the fighting, the men seem to have no reason for being there. They speak of the fact that the enemy is just like them, young and scared. The French are fighting and believe that their cause is right, just as the Germans are. When he is guarding Russian prisoners, he sees them as men just like himself. There is a noticeable absence of commanders in the novel. What middling superior officers there are come across as cruel, cowardly pretenders. Himmelstoss, the “drill sergeant” type who trained these men to fight is a sickeningly cruel man who deserves the revenge the men are able to exact upon him when he finds himself sent to the front. When the Kaiser comes to review the troops, the men cannot understand why he let the war happen–after all, he supposedly did not want war, the German people did not want war, the French did not want war, yet there is war.
The Term Paper on United States War American German
... the war. But the effort was in vain. ) The Germans thereupon began shifting troops from the Russian to the western front, preparatory ... the spring and summer of 1918. As men left for the fighting front, employment opportunities opened up for women. Some ... cpi mobilized some seventy-five thousand speakers - "four-minute men" - who delivered patriotic exhortations in churches, schools, movie houses, and ...
Remarque pulls no punches in describing man’s inhumanity to man. The mud, the lice, the rats, the blood and gore, the gas attacks–that is the war as described here. At one point early on, Baumer dives for cover in a graveyard of recently buried comrades; as the bombardment continues unabated, he scrambles under cover and then discovers the cover is a shattered coffin. At the front, the dead are killed over and over again. At one point, he passes a scene in which bodies have been blown apart, with parts hanging from trees all around. Forced to take shelter in a shell hole, Baumer kills a foreign soldier who falls into the hole with him; the man does not die quickly, and the experience is a revealing, emotional one as Baumer tries to help the man stay alive and then agonizes over the family this man will not come home to. For me, though, the most poignant scene in the novel comes early on when, in the wake of a heavy bombardment, the surviving men are all but driven mad by the sound of wounded horses. The cry of the horses, some of whom run and stumble around dragging their intestines on the ground, are more than the men can bear. Men fight wars; it is cruel to bring horses into the conflict, the men declare. It is a long, painful scene finally ended by the shots that end the horses’ suffering.
These pages contain the reality of war; as such, some will be bothered if not sickened by some sections of the story. As a conservative “hawk” who has never experienced anything along these lines, it is very good and useful for me to read this book. Remarque’s purpose in writing this book was to tell future generations how horrible war is and how it must be avoided at all costs if possible. The men who survive such an ordeal are dead inside; in Remarque’s case, an entire generation of Europeans (and Americans) died and suffered; those that returned were not the same men who went away to fight. If everyone read this novel, war would not be a constant affliction on humanity.
The Essay on War Horse from Book, Movie and Play
Have you ever witnessed a well-adapted animal thriving in its environment? Well similarly when a book is transformed into a movie or play it needs to be adapted so that it can thrive in its environment. For example if you read a great book and when you watch the movie you see every scene that you read in the book, the movie won’t be so good. There are many examples in which we see a movie or play ...
