… is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque about the First World War, narrated by Paul Baumer, a 19 years old German schoolboy-soldier, giving us an account of “a generation that was destroyed by the war – even those of it who survived the shelling”, with a common enemy being Death.
He is right. We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first hell to land went straight for our hearts. We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don’t believe in those things any more; we believe in the war …
We have turned into dangerous animals. We are not fighting, we are defending ourselves from annihilation. We are not hurling our grenades against human beings – what do we know about all that in the heat of the moment? – the hands and the helmets that are after us belong to Death himself, and for the first time in three day we are able to look Death in the eyes, for the first time in three days we can defend ourselves against it, we are maddened with fury, not lying there waiting impotently for the executioner any more, we can destroy and we can kill to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to take revenge …
But here in the trenches we have lost that memory. It no longer rises up from inside us – we are dead and the memory is far off on some distant horizon, an apparition, a puzzling reflection come to haunt us, something we are afraid of and which we love without hope. It is strong, and our desire is strong; but it is unattainable, and we know it …
And even if someone were to give us it back, that landscape of our youth, we wouldn’t have much idea of how to handle it. The tender, secret forces that bound it to us cannot come back to life. We should be in the landscape, wandering around; we should remember, and love it, and be moved by the sight of it. But it would be just the sane as when we see a photograph of one of our own friends who has been killed, and we sop to think about it. The features are his, the face is his, and the days we spent with him take on a deceptive life in our memories; but it isn't really him …
Nowadays we would no longer have any real links with the way we used to be. It wasn’t the awareness of how beautiful it was that meant so much to us, or of how good the atmosphere was, but the feeling of community, the way we all felt a kinship with the objects and events of our existence. That’s what set us apart and made our parents’ world a little difficult for us to understand; because somehow we were always gently bound up with that world, submissive to it all, and the smallest thing led us onwards along the path of eternity. Perhaps it was just the privilege of our youth – we were not yet able to see any restrictions, and we could not admit to ourselves that things would ever come to and end; expectation was in our blood, and this meant that we were at one with our lives as the day went by …
Now we would wander around like strangers in those landscapes of our youth. We have been consumed in the fires of reality, we perceive differences only in the way tradesmen do, and we see necessities like butchers. WE are free of care no longer – we are terrifyingly indifferent. We might be present in that world, but would we be alive in it?
We are like children, who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men, we are coarse, unhappy, superficial – I think that we are lost.
