On the cover, it says "The Greatest War Novel of All Time" and if I'm being completely honest, that initially turned me off. The thought of people making enemies of one another and attempting to blow each other to bits generally creates the urge to crawl into fetal position and rock myself into some sort of numbness. And I won't lie, there were plenty of of blood-and-guts scenes in this book. For example, the most hauntingly memorable for me—the description of a soldier whose feet were blown off, but who, out of sheer fear-driven adrenaline, managed to flee bombardment on the stumps of his shins. There were passages that literally made me feel faint—that frequently relegated my hand to an over-gaped-mouth position and that swallowed tears could not escape.
But here was the difference for me: Even the most gruesome of scenes in this book, are told from the palpably forlorn perspective of a soldier who, himself, comes to consider war as hugely misguided and unreasonably costly. The expense most forsaking, being the effects of emptiness and unrest a soldier must endure long after the threat of grenades and gunfire cease—no matter his "side" or his goal.
Here are a few of the passages I considered most poignant:
[The soldier viewing an enemy prison yard while on leave:]
"At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men [the enemy] with their childlike faces and apostles' beards. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet, we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free. I am frightened: I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss. It is not now the time but I will not lose these thoughts, I will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended. My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling; this is a task that will make life afterward worthy of these hideous years."
[The soldier, commenting on civilian naivety and biased press:]
"It's all that rot that they put in the war-news about the good humor of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in good humour: we are in good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces. Even so we cannot hold out much longer; our humour becomes more bitter every month. And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death."
[The soldier, considering memories of life before he knew war:]
"Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires—but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us... here in the trenches they are completely lost to us. The arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we know it."
[The soldier, on his comrades:]
"At once warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades. I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;—I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me."
Read it. And consider the narrator your loved one. We can't allow the word "soldier" to solely stand-in for what these brave, unfairly asked-of individuals are: fragile, beautiful, priceless, human beings. And the likes of war is something we cannot take back from them—ever.
