Some Remarques on War

Like many of us, I read Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front during my freshman year of high school. Not long before that, we'd seen Kuwait liberated from Iraq with so little fanfare that I had to doubt a war like Remarque described could ever happen again. (Though I remember few particulars from the book, the ugly, portentous phrase "carbolic and pus" somehow sticks in my mind, a distillation of Remarque's dozens of ugly scenes. I could stand to read it again—everything's better when it's not for a class.)

War is different these days, of course, in all but the most important respects. Here is Gary Giddins, in the New York Sun, on the DVD rerelease of the 1930 film of Remarque's novel:

Remarque's short, declarative sentences are a triumph of journalistic precision, packing more images of physical revulsion and mental anguish than the novel's modest length would indicate. Milestone's film also pursues accuracy, but it is more self-conscious in its search for style. His innovative use of cranes and other techniques ensure a mobile camera; the scenes of trench warfare, as soldiers charge into machine gun fire, have lost nothing to time — the battle scenes are visually stunning and emotionally taxing. He uses rapid editing to isolate and satirize members of mobs. His tracking of Kemmerich's boots adumbrates Steven Spielberg's girl in the red coat in "Schindler's List."

Milestone's camera twice passes through gates, from one space to another. It subdivides the screen in the scene where Paul and his friends study a poster, the men reflected in a mirror so that they seem to be standing to its right. It stops all together for 90 long seconds, showing only unmoving shadows as we hear the postcoital conversation of Paul and a woman he has bought with food. Today a filmmaker might not hesitate to shoot the decapitated lance-corporal ("He runs a few steps more while the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain"), but no one could improve on Milestone's indelible image of the soldier whose "body drops clean away and only his hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang on the wires." Milestone's subsequent career was a mixed bag, including racist wartime melodramas in the 1940s ("The Purple Heart"), but in 1930, he was the right man for the job.

War movies made in recent years—with the exception of those that try to capture the spirit of their predecessors—rarely feel like the old stuff we see on Turner Classic Movies. Think of Three Kings or Jarhead, or even documentaries like Gunner Palace. Do they have much in common with All Quiet on the Western Front? There is certainly less violence, but the violence is the same. It's always the same. In his essay "My War," the literary critic Paul Fussell recalled the following of March 15, 1945:

Before that day was over I was sprayed with the contents of a soldier's torso when I was lying behind him and he knelt to fire at a machine-gun holding us up: he was struck in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him another man raised himself to fire, but the machine-gun caught him in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves.

Among those who support the war in Iraq, there is a tendency to dwell on how different it is in character and scale than earlier ones. Sometimes we hear about the Bulge in these arguments; less frequently, thank God, we hear about the Peloponnesian War. The distinctions aren't much to be grateful for. Most soldiers in Iraq today could describe scenes like the ones above. This alone shouldn't force us to oppose the war, but it should force us to remember what it is.