“After all, war is war,” muses Paul Bäumer, the 20-year-old protagonist of the novel All Quiet on the Western Front. He has just stabbed a French soldier who tumbled on top of him in the muddy battlefields of the first world war.
Bäumer had volunteered to fight for Kaiser and fatherland, but nothing could have prepared him for the realities of war. Watching the young Frenchman convulse and gurgle as he slowly succumbs to his wounds, the intimacy of the killing temporarily shatters the illusion of abstract conflict. Full of desperate regret, Bäumer tells the dead soldier: “I see you are a man like me.” But, his comrades ask, what could he have done? Killing the enemy is what they had come for. Bäumer agrees: “After all, war is war.”
The German author Erich Maria Remarque wrote these lines as a first world war veteran. Published in 1929, his novel was a product of its time, written for a generation of Germans who felt they had been sent to hell and back for nothing.