After finishing this book I held my baby and was filled with dread that 'they' governments or nationalism or another power (and lie) structure described so plainly yet forcefully here would take his Iife and future, filling it with murder and death. Quite the message, and as a youth I was minutes from joining the army.
I surprised myself by knowing almost nothing about such a famous war book before reading it, I didn't even know it is from the German point of view. Not that it affects the message.
I consider it the best was novel I have read. Harrowing and brilliant. Simple yet profound.
The very first sentence states that it is not a condemnation but a record, though how modern readers could not condem the reasons, leaders, and general society that led, pursued, and escalated the war is hard to fathom. Though would today's civilization do much better? Hopefully.
At heart a simple story of a young group of classmates cajoled and bullied into signing up, with only the poor and simple seeing it clearly as a disaster from the start. There are few dates or battle names, it is a lived experience from an ordinary soldier. There are brilliantly written terrifying episodes of both hand to hand combat and modern warfare. Combined with the dreary, petty, and often disgusting life of a soldier in this war (think rats, lice, mutilations).
What really makes the book stand out is the psychological incisiveness. Seeing and feeling what this war did to these young men, both on the battlefield and when returning home.
The visceral fear and confusion during a gas attack in a cemetery will live with me for a long time. The matter of fact acceptance of the random chance of death coupled with the emotional detachment developed and required to survive by the men is jarring. Stating they were unwilling to fight, but crazed by a fear of death, knowing that the only way to overcome this was through violence, not so much against the French but against ahnaliation.
The trips away from the front offer physical saftey but more emotional pain. A theme in numerous later works it is brilliantly put here, with insightful context as to the impact of time upon the consciousness of the men. If they were sent back home in 1916 they would have "unleashed fury" but by 1918 nothing, as they were totally "devoid of hope" and with no one able to understand them, older people had a life they can go back to, but the young had that foundational part of life taken away, replaced with nothing but the war - "Superfluous to ourselves". He dispises and envys they people at home.
The language is often darkly poetic "the landscape of our youth consumed by fires of reality" "no man's land is outside us but inside us too" "How much misery in two little things you can cover with your thumb's" (talking about his eyes viewing POW). And to boot there is also a quite remarkable poem to the earth at one point.
There are juxtapositions of both micro and macro reasoning and suffering. The desperate promises he attempts to make with the man he stabbs, with the musings on how pointless all things, thoughts, and words are if things like this (the war) are possible as he surveys the maimed hospital patients, extrapolating the scene over all nations. "It ruined our entire generation, all nations".
Easy to see why the book was immediately banned by the NAZI's, and how they could tap a pool of disjointed and damaged men to their cause.
There are moments of genuine levity and touching fragments of true friendship and camaraderie. Tinged with an ouch ending. Outstanding.