On “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque ***

So a film based on this book has been up at the top of the charts on Netflix for a few months. I have known about and seen the book for years, but I never got around to reading it. At least one of my kids read it for school, however, so we had a copy on our shelf, and looking for something to read while on vacation, I settled on it.

As far as being a harrowing portrait of war and particularly World War I, this is a fine book. It has a little of the zaniness that is typical of many war books—practical jokes played among the troops, trying to get off or away from oversight to get a little extra food or sex, and so on. But the whole thing is tinged with a spirit of sadness and despair. These are men—barely more than boys, really, as they are typically 17 or so—who are discovering not the joys of life but its end, way too early.

And that is where this book is perhaps slightly more unique. It indites the culture that would send such young people to war, sometimes against their will, and certainly with a great deal of encouragement about the need to serve country and people, even as the older people stay home to “make decisions.” The main character, Paul Baumer, is part of a company of one hundred men, many of them from the same school. They've barely had a life. As the novel progresses, we watch the company slowly shrink, the boys become hardened (even as newcomers join the fray). Those moment of levity and spread thin across more moments of simply tedium punctuated by other moments of terror and plenty of descriptions of it: grisly ones of body parts strewn across the landscape where another company has just been. We have the coming home on leave section, where Paul hardly knows how to explain what he's been through and yet plenty of people want to hear about his “adventures.” We have Paul coming face to face with a man he kills and wishing he hadn't; indeed, trying to save his enemy. We have Paul trying to save many of his comrades—which brings us back to his company. I believe we join the action when there are roughly 38 or so such men left; we leave off action when there are 7. Such is life on the front lines—or indeed, in World War I, when a generation of young men were essentially wiped out in war. It is a hopeless book.

That hopelessness isn't what caused me to rank the book as relatively average. It is a powerful depiction of war, no doubt. It is not, however, much of a novel. I never really felt I came to know Paul's comrades (or even Paul) that well, which kills some of the pathos one would otherwise feel. There is also not much in the way of plot. Episode follows episode but without much of a buildup or structure. I suppose one could make a case for such a plot being not unlike (the) war itself, but the lack of character development really does seem a weakness. Yes, men come and go, but Paul seems very attached to those around him; I wish I could have felt the same way. Instead, they were names of people come and gone.