Larry Allums: What is war for?

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Larry Allums: What is war for?

Join the Points Summer Book Club as we look at modern conflict through the lens of World War I

03:36 PM CDT on Sunday, June 17, 2007

War is on America's mind this summer, so it's only fitting that we launch the Points Summer Book Club by reading and discussing two classic works about modern war. We approach the topic, however, not through the war in Iraq or the war on terror – both of which have generated a significant nonfiction literature to date – but rather through the armed conflict of 1914-18 that was called World War I, "the War to End All Wars" and "the Great War." We've chosen two books for reading and discussion, first online and later this summer in a public gathering at the Dallas Institute: German novelist Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, which first appeared in 1929, and Paul Fussell's nonfiction The Great War and Modern Memory, published in 1975.

Why World War I, almost a century after the first shots were fired in that civilizational conflagration? There are many reasons why World War I is relevant today, some factual, others cultural and even metaphysical. For one thing, the scale of it was enormous. But beyond physical dimensions, the Great War altered Western life in ways that still affect us all.

World War I was the first of its kind: a massive conflict fought with the full murderous capacity of modern technology, typified by the machine gun, the tank and poison gas. Though the war actually had several "fronts," the most familiar is the Western front, a zigzag network of parallel and auxiliary trenches that bracketed No Man's Land with barbed wire. It ran some 25,000 miles from the North Sea coast of Belgium southward through France to the Swiss border.

The United States entered the Great War late and suffered relatively few casualties – 116,000 soldiers killed, compared with 800,000 British, 1.4 million French, 1.8 million Russian and 2 million German combat deaths. The war exhausted Europe in every possible way and set the stage for America's emergence in the next world war as the carrier of Western values. The Europe of 2007, beset with crises specific to our time, is a continuation of the bloodied, shell-shocked Europe that finally staggered out of the trenches in November 1918.

World War I, then, was the primal experience of modern war for the West and defined its transition: from innocence to experience, from 19th-century optimism and hope to 20th-century pessimism (if not cynicism) and doubt (if not despair) about the future. With the ill-fated Versailles Treaty of 1919 in place, Europe seemed both literally and figuratively "The Waste Land" famously portrayed by T.S. Eliot in his poem of that name.

Bare descriptions of the war's main battles are unnerving. Consider the Battle of the Somme, which came to symbolize the particular horrors of the war: On July 1, 1916, after a weeklong bombardment of German trenches, 11 British divisions along a 13-mile front left their trenches and began walking across No Man's Land toward the enemy lines. Having comfortably survived the bombardment, German machine gunners assumed their positions and by the end of the day had killed or wounded 60,000 of their 110,000 attackers.

This was, and is, war at its most intense – and most modern.

Trench warfare had consequences that are familiar today. The term "shell-shock" entered our vocabulary in 1915; displaced by the more clinical "post-traumatic stress disorder," the two are essentially the same. Now the original word has re-emerged in the context of Iraq. As a recent Washington Post article commented, improvised explosive devices have "brought back one of the worst afflictions of World War I trench warfare: shell shock. The brain of a soldier exposed to a roadside bomb is shocked, truly."

The Great War had cultural impacts that reached throughout the West. No art escaped its ravages. Mr. Eliot's poem was only one of myriad expressions of disillusionment after 1918, which included A Farewell to Arms in 1929. There, Ernest Hemingway's anti-hero Frederick Henry gives his memorable assessment of the New Age's massive, apparently futile violence: "Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of river, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

The first book for the Points Summer Book Club, All Quiet on the Western Front, is a classic in its own right. Its muted, straightforward presentation sets it apart from Mr. Fussell's more full-throated account in The Great War and Modern Memory, which will follow Mr. Remarque's novel in our discussions. All Quiet is, however, anything but simple.

With its first words, All Quiet establishes an irony marking virtually all accounts of the Great War: "We are at rest five miles behind the front. Yesterday we were relieved, and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. We are satisfied and at peace. Each man has another mess-tin full for the evening; and, what is more, there is a double ration of sausage and bread. That puts a man in fine trim."

Soon the narrator reveals the reason for the double rations: Only about half their company has returned from the front.

Mr. Remarque's choice of narrators is key – 19-year-old Paul Bäumer, a common soldier in the German trenches. His first-person, present-tense narration builds in intimacy from the beginning until the final, two-paragraph chapter, when Mr. Remarque reverts suddenly to the third person.

The novel presents a catalog of wartime experiences – Mr. Remarque served in the Kaiser's army during the war – many of them distinctly modern. As Paul's narrative deepens and becomes layered, the multiple faces of war accumulate: day-to-day life in the trenches, furious attacks and confusing retreats, poison gas, deaths both sudden and slow, wounds both physical and mental, the loss of comrades who have become dearer than family. The strange attractions and peculiar bonds of war come to efface all other realities.

The alienating impact of war is a major presence in Paul's story. What really happens deep inside? So-called civilized life becomes unimaginable; when he is home on leave, apart from his brothers-in-arms, he cannot be at peace. Reacting to his father's desire that he talk about the front, he realizes that his father "does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. ... What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?"

Then there is the enemy – "they" versus "we," a dichotomizing reality of the trenches and a legacy still with us today, almost a century later. An agonizing instance occurs when Paul is trapped in a shell-hole with a French soldier whom he has stabbed. He grieves at the man's slow death and before the man finally dies has dressed his wounds, learned his identity and attempted to explain: "But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed."

Told from a soldier's perspective, All Quiet on the Western Front is the anti-war novel (banned and burned by the Nazis) that one might expect. But it is also a classic of World War I literature, and it achieves an ironic, sobering attitude that would hardly have been possible before this war with its catastrophic consequences.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell suggests that for the West, World War I was nothing less than the irreplaceable shattering of a worldview and a permanent shift in consciousness. We live even today in its shadow; it pervades the categories of our thought and is still imprinted on our collective imagination. The book's readers may be startled to discover how much of the way we see the world today comes out of the Great War experience.

Mr. Remarque's fictional account gives a foundation on which to ponder Mr. Fussell's larger conclusion. We sense as we read All Quiet on the Western Front that the terror of war must be like this even today. Every moment is as momentous as its meaning might be obscure. As one of Paul's comrades asks, "Then what exactly is the war for?" Perhaps that is one of the questions we will ponder and discuss in the coming weeks.

Larry Allums, director of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture, will be the leader of the Points Summer Book Club, which debuts online tomorrow. His e-mail address is lallums @ dallasinstitute dot org.

BOOK CLUB KICK-OFF

What we're doing: Join us in reading two enthralling books about war and in participating in a guided conversation on the blog, bookclubblog.dallasnews.com.

How does it work? Beginning tomorrow, the discussion begins on the landmark novel All Quiet on the Western Front. We will focus on the themes of the book and how they relate to war today.

How to join in: Send your questions and comments to moderator Rod Dreher at bookclub@dallasnews.com.

THE SCHEDULE

Tomorrow: Discuss All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Marcia Remarque, through July 1.

July 16: Discuss The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell, through Aug. 5.

Aug. 9: Join us and other book club participants at a town hall meeting at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, where we will talk in person about what we've learned.

Pick up a copy of the books at Borders, and prepare to learn about our tumultuous past and our complicated present.