All Quiet on the Western Front: The First Truth Essay

All Quiet on the Western Front: The First Truth

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the first books written about the harsh realities faced by the soldiers who fought in World War I. World War I is bloody and gruesome, and it appears as a reoccurring theme in the book. It conveys to the reader that in the face of war, human nature actually changes. Nationalism and patriotism are shown as a driving power to allow soldiers to volunteer to fight and we see these themes backfire. The war essentially woke up the world, not only because of the number of casualties, but also to the evil degree human nature can go.

Throughout the novel, the descriptions of battle are bloody and gruesome, as well as very detailed. These descriptions add a heavier truth to the book, especially in chapter four, when the second company is assigned to lay barbed wire and they get shelled. Paul helps a recruit puts his helmet back on, but the recruit who was extremely frightened, defecated his pants. Paul tells him that its normal at first. As the they are driving back in the truck, they get shelled again. When the shelling stops, Paul sees the recruit that he had helped earlier lying with a hip injury. There are flesh wounds and the bone is splintered. Remarque holds nothing back in the description of his hip. When Paul is carrying Kat (who is injured) over his shoulder he doesn't realize that a piece of shrapnel hits her head. These powerful accounts of the situations makes everything appear more realistic to the reader, making it easier to imagine.

There were over eight million deaths in World War 1. Death in the novel is treated impersonal. Death is no longer a loss of life and family and love, it is a job to clean up, a new bed for a new soldier, and more food for the soldiers. The cook worries more over if the men get extra food rather then the fact that seventy men died on the front. Kemmerichs boots are a symbol of this. Kemmerich originally gets the boot from a dead soldier. When he dies, the boots are passed on to Mller. When Mller is shot, Paul get's the boots. It shows that a pair of boots can outlast a human life.

As soldiers (both in the book and in the war) experienced more and more horrific incidents, they began to separate themselves from their emotions, simply because it was too difficult emotionally to experience the savagery of human nature. It was unfathomable of what man could do to other men.

We can see now that human nature actually changes in the face of war. To be able to kill someone who looks just like you, has a family just like you, and probably follows the same religion and might even speak the same language, requires a different soul. In chapter nine, Paul comes back in the sense that he removes that animal instinct when he looks at the French soldier he just killed and says, Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agonyForgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy. Throughout the novel, Remarque reminds us that that to enable the soldiers ability to kill, they must remove themselves from the situation an become almost animal - like. Paul refers to himself as a human animal. In chapter four, Paul says We march up, moody or good-tempered soldierswe reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animal. We continue to see that the soldiers who have been fighting the longest have to adapt this animal instinct. Humans are the only conscious animals on the planets. We have emotions. Without the emotions, we can become like savages. It is when we become like savages that we lose a piece of our humanity. We become something other than human. This goes to show that war destroys the ability to be human.

On the front, the men are consistently in danger of being killed. This consistent threat added to the emotional strain on the soldiers. It also added to creating more of a primal instinct, because they lived in fear. It was survival mode. The appalling conditions, including the decomposing bodies, lice, and rats, made their lives not those of civilization. This was a habitat, shared by rats and lice.

A combination of these abnormal stressors made it extremely difficult if not impossible to imagine a life with out the war. Paul especially really begins to see no hope for the future. He sees a life that always is war and begins to lose the confidence and skill to speak to his family. The only relationships throughout the novel are those with their fellow soldiers, because they have experienced everything together. Even those relationships are all at a cost.

The youth of the soldiers also adds to their emotional discomfort. The average age of a soldier in WW1 was twenty two years old. A lot of men were as young as seventeen. They had barely gotten their lives started. As the war went on, many forgot what normal and happy was. Remarque says in the epilogue, ...It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. When called the iron youth by Kantorek, the men lose their trust in authority figures. In chapter one, Paul says, For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity . . . to the future . . . in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. They feel that Kantorek betrayed them in the sense that he is responsible for making them feel the way they do. They are offended with this montage. They don't feel strong, or patriotic. They feel week and crazy. The men hate Kantorek for really persuading them to join the war.

Young and abled men at that time were really looked down upon by society if they did not join the military. This expectation from society really added even more pain and confusion to the soldiers, because no one understood what they were going through.

One of the main cause of World War I was nationalism. The novel portrays nationalism as a cheat to get the population of the country ready and willing to be exposed to war. On the front, it is shown that the soldiers are not fighting for their country, they are fighting for their lives. The enemy is the government. They want the glory and the power, at the cost of what? The soldiers feeling the way they did? The idea of war is a last resort of a fight for power.

When a country is at war, every one is sitting at the edge of their seat. With war you risk. You risk the power you have already attained. The soldiers begin to look at the situation incredulously. They can hardly believe that back home, the government is understanding that in order to gain power the soldiers must go through an unfathomable amount of emotional pain and suffering. They figure whats wrong with what we have.

Kantorek, the mens teacher had once talked to them of being brave and strong and later calls them the Iron Youth. As the novel goes on, more of Kantorek's speeches are revealed and the soldiers get more and more disgusted with them. This shows that over time, war has more and more of an effect. They even go as far as to blame Kantorek for Behm's death, saying that the ideals that Kantorek kept talking about couldn't protect them from death.

The First World War had a detrimental affect on the soldiers who fought in it. Because of the Industrial Revolution, humans could now kill on a scale that not many people were ready for. The shell shock that the soldiers experienced truly goes to show that men are human. Human do have emotions, and they dictate a lot of society and how society is. When they shut off these emotions, some soldiers never got them back. The war truly killed them even if they did not die. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the first books that gave people insight as to what went on every day in the trenches and on the front. It made people question human nature, and how could human nature track so far off. It changed the view of the globe, and that is something that cannot be achieved easily.