GERMAN WAR BOOK.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5458, 7 August 1929, Page 2

GERMAN WAR BOOK.

“THE WESTERN FRONT.” A REVIEW. That much-discussed, much-praised, and at the same time much-maligned book, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” has been, read for this paper with the idea of seeing what all the pother is about, and the reviewer cannot see anything to take serious objection to, except one passage giving an occurrence of an incident purported to have taken place in a hospital. It might have taken place, but taken place on just one occasion in just one hospital out of all the hundreds extant during the last war. It has no bearing whatsoever on war, and, being decidedly offensive, should have no place in the book. The baser animal instincts of men vftre certainly brought,out during the war, but not to the utterly brazen extent pictured in the hospital scene —a line was drawn somewhere.

Several unimportant sentences could quite well have been omitted without in any way impairing the theme of the book. It was evidently the author’s intention to give a plain, unvarnished tale of the war. Then why, in all truth, did he not go the whole hog and let run riot over his pages all the filth, bestiality, and degradation of war, so as to be equally consistent. That, of course, would have been utterly impossible, for in a true account of the lives of the aver-: age homo sapiens are happenings and tales that could not be put into print. They are left out as understood and as unnecessary exemplification of human weaknesses. In the same manner Reimarque might well have left unwritten several sentences and words. All the world knows they occur and arc said ; there is no use in elaborating on tfyem. The author in his desire to illustrate the worst coarsening of man by war could have pvt it more forcibly and more tellingly in other and more effective words. So much for that side of the book. For the main body of the book there can be nothing but praise. The stark brutal horror of war is presented in words that in some passages, which, despite their awful subject, amount almost to poetry. • The book has been mooted as one to help end war. To make it thoroughly effective the unnecessary passages should be cut out and another chapter added covering in other nonobnoxious but none the less adequate 1 words that side of war. The volume should be illustrated with photographs of the most appallingly gruesome nature, coloured preferably, to visually disabuse the lay mind of the horrors of wav and show the terrible naked truth. Then the book should be translated into every language and distributed to man, woman, and child, One or two of the same type and the women of the world, and the saner men, would see to it that this universe , saw no more spilling,of human blood in warfare.