posted on 01 Oct 2018

Rereading the Great War

During these centenary years of the First World War – or perhaps in the immediate lead up to them – I think I have reread all the main novels and memoirs of the period: Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That; Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy, The Memoirs of George Sherston; Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War; Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front; and the less well known Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel. The last two are the only German accounts I have read and the only ones I am aware of. Remarque’s is implacably anti-war, made him an enemy of the Nazis, and resulted in his books being burnt; Jünger’s is a staunchly nationalist and militarist account and found great favour with Hitler. Goodbye to All That (here) and All Quiet on the Western Front (here) have been previously reviewed on Letterpress, but I thought there might be some value in looking at the key First World War books together.

All the writers mentioned above were born in the years 1895 to 1898. Remarque, born in 1898, was I think the youngest when he was called up and his novel – which I have just reread for the first time in many, many years – describes the experience of four school friends, all aged nineteen, and a handful of older friends and squadron members, in the Flanders trenches.

Anyone wanting to learn more about the First World War and the experience of the frontline soldier will at some point read some or all of these books. They are the inexhaustible legacy of a generation of men who in the decade following the end of the war began to try and make sense of what they had seen, what they had witnessed, what they had done and what they had endured.

After initially feeling quite lukewarm about Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer I found that the best way into his work is to read the trilogy in order. It has become one of the series of books about the Great War that I return to most frequently, and I find that every volume has its particular rewards – and I include in those rewards the sometimes slightly Pooterish and fussy tone of Sassoon’s alter ego, George Sherston. It is a quintessentially English account of the period.

I need to read Blunden’s book again, but I recall it being almost unfathomably reserved, even pedestrian at times, as if resolute in its determination not to glamorise war. Grave’s Goodbye to All That also needs another rereading, but it is probably true to say that of the ‘memoirs’ (and it is the only one to claim the status of ‘autobiography’) it is the most sophisticated. Graves revised the original 1929 version heavily for republication in the late-50s and in his magisterial review of Great War literature the critic and historian Paul Fussell describes Graves as “a tongue-in-cheek neurasthenic farceur whose material is ‘facts’”. This will give you some idea of the complexity and sophistication of Graves’s book.

Perhaps inevitably, the First World War book currently uppermost in my mind is the one I have just finished – Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. But it is uppermost in my mind for another reason too – and one that I have only just worked out: of the accounts I have considered here, his is the most ‘novelistic’, the most modern – indeed, in some ways, the most modernist.

Let me try and explain.

To anyone – like me – unfamiliar with the structure and traditions and duties of military life, almost any book that has even a smattering of military history seems written in an alien language. This is very much the case I think with the works of Sassoon, Blunden, Graves and perhaps to a lesser degree Jünger. There is something about even the texture of the prose that seems to smell of old webbing belts and the curious odour of khaki drab (at least, the curious odour it has whenever I have encountered old uniforms in army surplus shops). And I say this not to denigrate the sometimes almost unbearable impact any and all of these books will have on the reader.

But Remarque’s novel is different. From the very first page we are cast into a fiery caldron of life in the frontline trenches. We are spared nothing: no description of terror, of bombardment, no atrocious wounding, no failed convalescence, no putrefaction, no amputation, and no pitiful maiming – whether of man or animal (there is a description of wounded horses trying to run and tripping over their own intestines which even now I read with my eyes partly covered) – is too terrible to be considered. Remarque, one feels, is determined that we will hear it all and will never be able to say, “But we didn’t realise.”

He is absolutely unequivocal: war is an obscenity. “How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought,” Paul Bäumer (essentially Remarque) says, “when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out…”

But there is also something more about Remarque’s book that is unusual: it is written from the perspective of the young and one of its recurring motifs is that the war has stripped these men not just of their youth but of the only type of life they knew – school or college – and their pasts seem irreparably fractured from whatever their futures might hold. Most have not worked and they have no careers that will give their post-war lives shape, purpose or social context; they have no experience of life; and outside of military brothels most have no experience of women. They themselves, the young, were “more to be trusted” than the generation that had sent them to war: “They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces…We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

Remarque’s novel, then, has a psychological depth about it – an interior dialogue, a consciousness and self-consciousness – that seems both modern and modernist, and this is relatively uncommon in First World War writing. While his may not necessarily be the greatest of the Great War books, I think it is accurate to say that it is the most fully realised novel of that period. When I finished it this weekend I put it down with a frank sigh of relief – its closing pages, especially the account of Bäumer’s hospitalisation and recovery before he is sent back to the frontline for a third time, are gruelling reading.

Each of these books has something different to offer and none of them needs a centenary to justify their reading. Quite the reverse, they clamour to be read. But I think All Quiet on the Western Front makes its demands more vociferously and in a more modern and somehow more accessible way than all of the others, and if I was looking for a place to start with Great War literature, I think this would be it. It is an extraordinary and unforgettable book.

 

Alun Severn

October 2018