“1917” is a current must see film. I’m told it is not to be
missed, but I won’t be going. No matter how good, it cannot better the film I
saw inside my head last month when I read “All Quite on The Western Front”
"Continuous fire, defensive fire, curtain fire,
trench mortars, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words but they
embrace all the horrors of the world"
Your name is Paul Bäume. You are a young German student,
looking forward to completing your education, meeting pretty girls, having fun
and making your mark in the world. But suddenly that world has vanished. You
are in the army, lying in mud at the bottom of a shell hole and WWI is raging
around you. You could die at any moment.
"We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take
the world by storm. We are fleeing from ourselves, from our life. We were
eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to
pieces."
The suffering and terror of war make no sense to Paul and
his friends. He has no quarrel with young Frenchmen or Englishmen. No desire to
kill them. Yet, in desperation for his own life he does kill a French soldier
in hand-to-hand combat. As he lies exhausted at the bottom of a shell hole full
of remorse, he watches the man slowly die. He examines the man's papers; he
sees he was a printer; he sees the photographs of a wife and children. In his
shame, he makes a promise to the dead man that should he survive he will fight
against the things that have wrecked both their lives. Such killing must never
happen again.
The utter waste of war pervades the whole book. No more so
than in a hospital where Paul is recovering from a leg wound. He is lucky, he
will live and walk again but around him men are dying from all manner of
terrible wounds on every part of their bodies.
"How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds
must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent
and pointless if thousands of years of civilisation weren't even able to
prevent this river of blood............Only a military hospital can show you
what war is."
All Quite on The Western Front is a wonderful novel,
immersing the reader in the lives of a small group of young men as day after
day they face the unimaginable horror of trench warfare; only able to
endure through comradeship, ingenuity, humour and courage.
"Summer, 1918. Never has life in its simplest
outline seemed so desirable to us as it does now; the poppies in the fields
near our base camp, the shiny beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings
in the cool, half dark rooms, black, mysterious trees at twilight, the stars
and the streams, dreams and a long sleep. Oh life, life, life!"
Do read it, especially if you’ve been to see “1917”.
Which is the better film do you think?
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