The cover of my copy bills Erich Remarque’s most famous work as “the greatest war novel of all time”. While the blurb on the back suggests the cover design team may not have actually read the book, it’s hard to argue with that judgment after doing so.
Style is hardest to judge, especially in translation, but in A. W. Wheen’s hands Remarque’s narrative flows along easily, snagging occasionally on the commonplace vulgarities of a soldier’s life – soldiers in the barracks, on the parade ground, in the field, the outhouse, the trenches, with women or without. The surprise of this juxtaposition of the literary with the crudities of life is maintained somehow through the end of the work. What is more, it is this novel, I suspect much more than similar devices used less masterfully by Hemmingway or others, that have influenced popular military historical or speculative fiction – at the current time, authors such as Bernard Cornwell, John Ringo, or David Drake – down to the present, whether directly or indirectly.
Thematically, Remarque only offers questions and tensions. The camaraderie of the army is contrasted with the essential brutality and villainy of war; the success of the army in training men to fight is set against the apparent impossibility of veterans fitting back into a normal life; the deep friendships formed under stress are highlighted by the sheer ephemerality of life in a war – especially this one. The narrative follows a German soldier in World War I from – this can be worked out but is not clearly stated – the summer of 1916 through about the end of 1917, with much briefer snapshots through 1918 as the war drew to its close. The majority of the book suggests the private but regular style a man might use keeping a journal; whether the more erratic end of the book intentionally suggests a breakdown or Remarque was just sick of his subject but felt some kind of conclusion was necessary – or both – is hard to tell.
I’ve read no other work that comes close to conveying the horror and degradation of war – so much so that one is even forced to some sympathy, on reflection, for Chamberlain and the other appeasers of the 1930s. It is not strange that it should have seemed worth almost anything to avoid going through “all that” again. It makes one wonder, really, about the whole genre of military fiction that exists for light or “pleasure” reading. David Weber once referred to such works where the heroes suffer no agonies as “military pornography”, but Remarque’s novel makes you wonder whether any work that treats war lightly, as merely a plot or setting or without having some point to make, is much better.
If I were to challenge the cover’s claim, offhand the only work that comes to mind in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels – although Shaara wrote about the officers’ war, while Remarque shows us the private soldier; and Shaara confined himself to one battle fought in a few days, where Remarque takes in a sweep of years.
Romance of Victory 