YOUTH AT WAR

Hokitika Guardian, 1 June 1929, Page 7

YOUTH AT WAR

GIiiTAIAN PiUYA'l'w’S VIEW

REMARQUE’S REALISM

Thirty-one .veins ago Erich Mari;. JiOllKli (J iIC iIS uOI'II 111 51 lli/UC Iv/vVII ih the Rhineland. At ilie beginning o, this year iw was ii nonentuy —lie wamerely one of imliions of young men who had iought and sulteied m tin Great War. To-day he is knowii throughout the world as the author m one of the greatest books on the vvai •iliac lias been written.

“im Western NiciiLs Neues’’ appeared in Germany on January 31 and tin publishers bad sold nearly 300,000 copies before it was launched in England at the '2"d of March, under the title of “All Quiet on the Western Front.” liy this time sales of the original and the translation may well have reached one million copies. A remarkable tribute to the author and his book was paid in his Anzac Day speech in London by Sir lan Hamilton. “Yet even while I speak of war as an adventure I may be singing the swan song of that side of its existence,” lie said. “The static wars of trenches, with barbed wire, flame throwers, and poison gas will never more poison civilisation. Ex-service-men won’t have it. Reniai'que’s work. ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ has definitely killed it. The author deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for ten years in succession.”

WHO REMARQUE IS,

Erich Remarque came from a family of French extraction that emigrated into Germany at the time of the French Revolution and settled lithe Rhineland. At the age of 18 li< volunteered with fhe other lads of his class and went straight from schoo ! into the Army. He served from 191 b till the end of the war on the Western Front, where all his schoolmates were killed. His mother died whip lie was in the trenches. At the end of the war he was alone in the world. His subsequent life is typical of the deep unrest that men of his generation experienced as a result of tlu war. At first he felt the need of res* and quiet and became a teacher ir a. small out-of-the-way village on the moors, but after some months of thu he found the loneliness depressing, and tlien in quick succession he became an organist in an asylum, a music teacher, the manager of a smal business, a motor-car dealer, a technical draughtsman and a dramatic critic. Then for a time he left Germany. While abroad ho won a rather large sum at roulette, and with this he travelled. On his return lie became foreign correspondent for u large firm, then its publicity manager and finally editor and motor specialist in Berlin.

REALITIES OF WAR

Last year Remarque wrote down without taking any previous thought, his own and his friends’ experience o in t.lie war. and in “All Quiet on th" Western Front” he lias given Fluworld the thoughts and experiences of the average man—German, Lntish. French, Belgian. Austrian. Ha'inn Russian. c eQ>jan. Rumanian. Bubrnr inn or Turk. American. Canadian Australian or New Zealander—whe mossed from civilian life through tlm fierv ordeal of 1914-18. That is tlm pierit of tlie hook. Tt is well tlia 1 tlie world should not ho permitted t° forget what a horrible business waif. To the vast, majority of the mil- - of men who took part in it tbypassing of the years has dimmed Hwmcinorv of its daily horrors, and tin-' is welk Tt i« more than ten yearsince the fighting ended, and a generation is growing up that knownothing of "Tint was for four yearthe duilv life- of its fathers or elde” •brothers- the war of high explosive;anrl niachine-giins and barber), wii—i'f flame-throwers and poison gases. o f Ginks and bomb-dronping aeroplaneand all the rest of the scientific paraphernalia of mod-m warfare. Fre-' ■•he dav lie left the arrev the averac • man was consent to think and tal ' about other tilings and become a normal human being again. ft. t“ well, therefore, lest the terrible less-” of the war ..ho forgotten, that C. F Montague, and Henri Barhnssc. an- 1 Arnold Z'voig, and "Remarque an-' 1 others slioubl tr-11 flip world just wlia + the war really was from the point of view of the average mail. They reveal irtanv commonplaces of the soldier’s daiiv life that we-e unknown even at divisional or corps lv n! 'dquar’' e-s. Tim ev-soldier, no . matter of wliat nationality, will recognise liiivsc'f ami hi« mates in their pages.

I'll “AD Quiet oil the Western Front.’’ Rema-ouo does not spare hirender’s feelings or susceptibilities. He is not afraid to tell the star 1 ' truth about many tilings in the snldier’s dailv life in the trenches an' 1 *he “reef’ areas and 1 1 is telling wd’ mail”, ft wd 1 1•o sai-l 1 -U* ‘ s-'f*l- - should ho ’(-It untold, and th-f no rrood purpose is serve*! hv +liei” t'-lUnir. lv-f :>f‘er al 1 . 11'—;m|U<- f*J ♦ eM.iiv -he 1-rut-d tr-‘h about war -U'l i* is we’l f-nf -i be world ®lruT’ I '*uiw it. To armies at war none '-•*

Min tl)in"c Mv< t avc f " ,l -'cd r-f I•' polite society are hidden —there is n n -o-ivaev niT-nii"'it s'-hlo-r®—and wh•M'—arrioe tel's us of them was just e® •mull part of the dailv lile and tal ,> f f],,, averacn c-oldior .‘IS e‘Minrr n.lld drinking and training and fighting.

GHASTLY PICTURES

He gives real pictures of raids and bombardments and 'barrages, of attacks and counter-attacks. Ho lays bare the thoughts and feelings of the “old hand” and the recruit as they cower in the pitifully inadequate shelter of dug-out and trench, under a hail of bursting shells. “We sec men with their skulls blown open; we see soldiers run with their two fee l cut off, they, stagger on their splintered stumps info the next shell-hole • n lance-cornoral crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his. smashed knee afer him. . . . Wo see

men without mouths, without jaws, without faces; we find one man whims he'd the artery of his arm in hu teeth for two hours in' order not to bleed ‘to deatli /Still tlu

little piece of convulsed earth b' which wo lie is held. We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But or every yard there lies a dead man.’ And when they are relieved thirtytwo men are the sole survivors of a company of 150. There is a ghastU' description of the wounding of a team of horses, and an even more dreadfu 1 one of a gas attack. “These first minutes with the mask decide between life and death;' is it tightly woven 7 T remember the awful sights in tlm hospital; the gas patients who in daylong suffocation cough their burnt lungs up in clots.”

Remarque tells of the wounded and of his experiences in hospital. “Or the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds am double amputations. On the vigil side are the jaw wounds, gas cases nose ear and neck wounds. On the left 'the blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the intestines. Here it man realises for the first time in how many places a man can get hit. .

A man cannot realise that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one singlo station; there are hun dreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. . . It must he all lies and of no accoun when the culture of a thousand year could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chain hors in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”

These and many other pictures o war Remarque gives us. He afford 1 some glimpses of the German militar; machine at work’ in barracks am training camps; and of the hopeles feeling of a soldier on leave when In listens to the talk of father an mother, and the reopV of the villag who cannot understand. “All Quiet on the Western Front' is translated for the German by aAustral mu, Mr V. IV. Wheen, and : puhMshed by G. P. Putnam’s Sons London.

AN AMERICAN TRIBUTE

Writing in tlie “Saturday Review of Literature’’ (New A ork), Cliristcnlier Aforley says of the hook: “Tla iug read proofs of the ’Knglish edition, T cannot res!rain mentioning mv eagerness for its publication liom . I should like to see it sell a milium conics, ft is, to me, the greatest hook about tlie war that I have seen • greatest by virtue of its blasting simplicity. Monntague’s Disenchantment was a great hook, hut a subly intellectual hook, a book for the mere hundred thousand or so people who thoroughly understand print. 'lbis hook, as one might guess by the beautifirestrained ironv of its original tit'e (‘Till AVesten Nicbts Nones’), plunge® into the trouble from the viewpoint -if the ordinary German footslogger. The quiet honesty of ihs tone, its com.,ipjo human candour, tlie fine vulgarity of its plain truth (nlninlv and l-ea-itif id translated!. make it s”-pv'-iue. One of tin- oddest tiling- T • imw is that at least one big publisher in New York hemmed and hawed ar-d babbled about expurgating it. Tinwar was not expurgated for Ho:who went through it. T r-v-mv! a- - •nature reader who ha® a chain e t« ,-cad this hook and does not, and who. having read it, does not pass it on among a dozen others, as a traitor to hi-ma nit v.

A'oi! ne-d not load vnur slie've.® -vl" i.j.r war hi®! ones. One or tw> tlii-m like this -od “Disem-imnOni-ut” I ■' von most of what you imed to know."