The Horror of the World

The Horror of the World

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT-- Erich Maria Remarque--Little, Brown ($2.50).

England's august Manchester Guardian has flatly called this German work "the greatest of all war books.' It moves in space, not in time. The interest of the scene completely dwarfs the interest of the story.

The Scene. "We" are the older soldiers (Tjaden, Westhus, Detering, Katczinsky) and the 19-year-old ones (ex-students all: Kropp, Muller, Leer, and "myself"-- Paul Baumer). We are at the Western Front. We feel the Front in our blood. Shells whistle, our senses sharpen. We feel the animal in us. we want to hide in the earth. An uncertain red glow spreads along the skyline before us. Great heavies boom like an organ. Smaller shells howl, pipe, hiss. Searchlights sweep the dark sky, halt, quiver on a black insect-- the airman. He falls. A bell rings--Gas! I remember the gas patients coughing out their burnt lungs in clots. I don my mask. Like a big, soft jellyfish the gas floats.

We are in our dugout. The Front cages us in. The barrage gets heavier. An attack must be coming. Shells howl, flash, bang. Our own hands tremble but we must watch the new recruits. They are mere children with narrow shoulders, so terrified they cannot control their bowels. One of them has a fit, runs outside. Result: the trench gets plastered with lumps of flesh, bits of uniform.

Suddenly the noise ceases. We run out. The French storm-troops are 100 yards away. It is not against these men we fling our bombs. It is against Death, now visible, hunting us down. They keep coming, we fall back to our second line while our artillery mows them down. We want to rest but we are driven forward from behind: we counterattack. Beside me a lance-corporal has his head torn off. He runs a few steps more while the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain. I fall into an open belly. I see a man biting his own arm. I see another stagger away holding his front in. We regain our trench. The rats leave our dugout, to fatten on dead and dying in No Man's Land.

The Front changes. Now we see tanks come our way, squashing dead and wounded, we see a man with a hose spouting liquid fire. "He fell in October, 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front."

The Story. The net effect is feverish horror. Surcease is afforded bY Paul's leave, by a stolen feast, by the men's comradeship, by their tender care of the absurdly young recruits, by mild affairs with several motherly prostitutes.

The Significance is bitterly condensed in two sentences. At the Front, murder, "that very crime on which formerly the world's condemnation and severest penalty fell, becomes our highest aim." The other sentence. "Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades--words, words, but they hold the horror of the world."

There is a vivid, merciful unreality about the book. At the Front, Paul has trained himself to sense without realizing. If one let oneself be fully conscious of the Front, one would turn idiot or deserter. Yet, stifling the reaction within himself, he only buries it deeper, so that upon all things even behind the Front he looks through spectacles colored by experience at the Front. All Paul's fellow-soldiers echo this psychological process, a process of permeation-by-repression. To be permeated by horror is to be destroyed spiritually. That is how the book tells, simply, ''of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped the shells, were destroyed by the war."

Author Remarque's style sometimes achieves the beauty of bald statement. Example: "He is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him." Necessarily there are hideous words and phrases, of which the Book-of-the-Month Club expurgated seven of the worst from this U. S. edition.

The Author. Erich Maria Remarque. 31, is a French-German. In 1916 he left school for the Western Front. When peace came, he carelessly turned his hand to whatever offered, became teacher, organist, business executive, automobile dealer, theatre critic. Money won at roulette enabled him to travel. Money gone, he wrote this book. Now he may resume his travels for since January, when it appeared the book has sold more than a half-million copies at six gold marks ($1.50) the copy. But the War destroyed the comrades to whom he was devoted; destroyed, too. his youth and spirit. He does not forgive.