About four years ago, I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque on a Sunday in November, a lot like this one. It was painful. Paul (the “protagonist,” if there is one) is a brutal narrator. Reading most of the book in a day made his story more real, rushed, and urgent. I remember reading certain parts and shutting the book out of horror. Crying wasn’t rare.
During most of high school, I would say All Quiet was my favorite book. I’m not sure why. Not because I ‘enjoyed’ it. Only a sadist could. Maybe because it immersed me, and Paul’s voice had been inscribed on my mind. His story was more concrete and rattling than any history I’d learned before. While it is a novel and Paul did not exist in a literal sense, millions of people experienced his story. As shameful as it is to say, these millions had just never been real to me. As Camus, who lived through WWII in France, wrote:
“But what are a hundred million deaths? … Since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” — Albert Camus, The Plague, pg. 4.
Reading the book made these deaths more than just a puff of smoke; or at least, it made a few of these deaths real. Remarque turned them into ink on paper, which became thoughts and memories ingrained in neurons in my brain. Once-empty phrases gained powerful meaning: “Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world” (All Quiet on the Western Front, 46). If only the generals and political leaders of WWI were able to read this book during the war. Then again, most of them experienced the nightmarish inspiration for All Quiet firsthand, and most were still able to dissociate it from their actions and continue the war.
I feel intense anger at the generals who tossed away countless lives mindlessly. They had an attitude similar to Napoleon’s:
“You cannot stop me. I can spend 30,000 men a month.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, Letter to Klemens von Metternich
Human life is the currency of war. The WWI generals were spending it. They poured hundreds of thousands of human bodies into Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, the Marne, like they were depositing piles of cash into the morbid bank of war. The supreme commander of the Allied forces in 1918, known for being reckless with human life during the Flanders, First Marne, and Artois campaigns, said something reminiscent of Napoleon’s quote:
“It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.” — Ferdinand Foch (source: Nine Divisions in Champagne by Patrick Takle)
Doesn’t it sound like he’s quoting a price: we could train this general, but it will cost us 15,000 lives? Is that all the Great War was to these generals? A storm of prices, budget allocations, necessary costs, spending decisions? But behind each number was not a dollar but an individual, usually a man around my age, torn away from life and drafted into the process of destroying it en masse.
“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.” — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ch. 10
I find it hard to imagine that these people were the same as we are. Were people just different back then? Their generation went through horrors we cannot imagine, and then went through them again in the Second World War. Could my generation survive the trenches? Could we slog through the mud of Passchendaele, our minds broken by the beating of artillery and the sight of death, and continue to fight? I think the answer is yes; but I hope we never get the opportunity to prove it.
No one would like to think they are capable of atrocity or extraordinary violence. But this belief disregards history. Many of the people who reported the Armenian genocide during WWI, who decried the Ottomans for their brutality and inhumanity, were German military officers operating in Turkey. They thought they were fundamentally different from the monsters they condemned. Twenty-one years later, some of the same people would be involved in committing Holocaust. We all have a capacity for barbarity. Only by recognizing its existence and working against it can we prevent repeating history.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
We failed to make good on our ancestor’s promise that WWI would be the war to end all wars. It has been one hundred years, and this planet has been scarred by more atrocity, violence, and mass destruction. Perhaps more than even veterans of the Great War could imagine.
Now, we live in the most peaceful time in history by most metrics. There hasn’t been a direct confrontation between great powers since 1945. But our peace is almost as fragile as the “concert of Europe” before World War 1. Almost all of the world’s major powers could obliterate life on Earth with a nuclear war and subsequent nuclear winter. Global military spending (the combined defense spending of every country) is at an all-time high (source). Seemingly minor movements, like China’s expansion into the South China Sea and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, reveal the tension underlying the global geopolitical order.
And nationalism is making a resurgence globally. About a week ago, Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil. This is a self-proclaimed nationalist who has said things like “I’m in favor of the military regime,” “it’s all right if some innocent people die. Innocent people die in many wars,” and “The only mistake of the dictatorship was torturing and not killing” (source). Our president has said “I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word” (source). Far-right parties are gaining momentum in Europe. These trends should worry anyone who has read about the first half of the 20th century.
I remember hearing that the last WWI veteran had died, when I was 13. I didn’t understand this much, but I had listened to my grandpa’s stories about Vietnam. I was wistful and even heartbroken I would never have the chance to hear about WWI from someone who was actually there. Assuming I survive for a while longer, I will probably also live through the death of the last person who fought in WWII, and the last person who experienced the Holocaust. I have a friend who is an international student from Rwanda. His parents lived through the genocide. He told me that they constantly remind him to tell his children their stories, for when the generation who remembers an atrocity disappear, the atrocity once again becomes possible. Hopefully I can be one of the minds that remembers these horrors and helps prevent them.
There are twenty-seven years until the centennial of World War II. These years should be treated as a test for humanity, everyone alive today, and our global political system. Have we overcome global war and permanently ended it? Have we finally decided to prioritize peace, human well-being, and the survival of the human species over geopolitical power games, tribalism, and the relentless struggle for limited resources? Or over these two decades, will we simply repeat what happened in the last century?
Note: Over the past month, I’ve listened to Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon podcast about WWI. It’s amazing. It has a perfect balance between historical fact, primary sources, background info, and his personal analysis. And it is free! People (including me) pay thousands for college lectures that are far worse than this podcast. Yes, all parts combined it’s about 15 hours long. But it is important and worth it, and strung out over a few weeks of listening while driving, running, walking, etc, that isn’t that much time.