All Quiet on the Western Front
by , translated by A. W. Wheen. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1929. 12mo. viii + 289 pp. $2.50.
As one looks back on the few war novels that are memorable in our dozen years of peace it will be recognized that they divide roughly into two classes: narratives such as Le Feu, by Barbusse, which focus attention on ‘one small group of people in one small group of circumstances,’ and, secondly, novels like Mottram’s Spanish Farm trilogy, or The Case of Sergeant Grischa, by Arnold Zweig, which seek to weave together the many different threads of the war experience into some such enormous design as that of War and Peace.All Quiet on the Western Front belongs in the firsl category: written, like Le Feu, in powerful language, it gives expression to the violent feelings, the stifling dread, which the war evoked in a squad of German infantry.
The book comes very pat. We have had from our own side — in memoirs, journals, and fiction — so much plain speaking and special pleading as to surfeit one’s interest. There remains the mystery of what went on behind the German lines. The Kaiser and his staff have contributed their not always honest explanations; the U-boats, the Zeppelins, and von Richthofen’s ‘circus’ have been popularized for their daring; there remains the more important, as it is the more searching, story of what the German private in the front rank thought and suffered. Viewed from a Red Cross meeting in Oshkosh, the Boche appeared to be a coarse brute capable of unbelievable atrocities; viewed from a trench periscope on a tranquil sector, he seemed very like ourselves. That he was no better and no worse—though much more severely put upon — is the impression gained from this strong and vivid book.
The impressions are the more striking for the fact that they communicate the most intangible feelings that the war produced, feelings which departed the veterans in 1919 and lie buried with the dead. For such accuracy we have the translator as well as the author to thank. Here is that devotion — unquestionably the noblest by-product of the Waste — which grew up between men of all ranks, and only a shadow of which is represented in the term “buddies.’ Here is the instinctive tear that threw a man flat at the whine of a shell meant for him, that turned his legs to water when lost on a night patrol, yet enabled him to survive under a drum barrage. Here is the hunger that created what the French call ‘System D,’ that predatory filching of food and drink which went on night and day even in the most God-forsaken sector. Above all, here is the inhuman suffering, the brutality of iron and gas which made of the war another world, to which — unless in such phrases the young be warned — we shall inevitably return. Impressions such as these, though they relate specifically to a German squad, will be recognized for the truth by all combatants.
It is universal truth, yet with a slight local difference. We miss the joking, the ‘kidding,’ which was to be found in every Allied army, which tempered one’s contempt for discipline, which made repos the sweeter and ‘the lines’ more endurable. The men in this book are Frisians; perhaps a national characteristic explains their melancholy, their tendency to weep, when a dough-boy would be full of coarse humor. Or perhaps it was simply the gradual starvation of the last two years that depressed them.
EDWARD WEEKS