by Morton Mcinvale

Created on: June 19, 2009   Last Updated: June 21, 2009

The carnage of the First World War lurks in the shadows of statistics, of worn sepia photographs, of grainy old film whose Kaisers and Tsars and generals and nurses jerk clumsily across the screen in Chaplinesque semi-comedy. But nothing short of the nightmares haunting the sleep of those who survived The Great War can depict its horrors better than Erich Maria Remarque in his epic All Quiet on the Western Front. Statistics can numb us to the meaning of horror, of death. As Josef Stalin commented, and as Hollywood and American journalism of today attest, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions. . .simply numbers."

Through the life and death of one man - Paul Baumer, a simple German soldier -, Remarque created perhaps the greatest tragedy ever written about war. No statistics. No gratuitous graphic description. No political or moral agenda . The carnage of mutilated bodies hanging on barbed wire, yellow-faced victims of gas attacks coughing up their lungs, ruined villages, smoky barren No-Man's Lands eerily similar to the blackened earth of Mordor portrayed in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (Tolkien served on the Western Front), the chatter of machine gun fire through the night - Remarque relates simply and without dwelling on it. "Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly. . .terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; but it kills, if a man thinks about it." It is through Baumer and his mess-mates Katczynski, Leer, Tjaden, Kropp, Muller and others that Remarque brings the true carnage of The Great War to life in showing - rather than saying - how war numbs the human spirit. Dead comrades become simply heaps with blue skins and blackened lips. In another scene, a soldier has just died; Baumer watches the cigarette still burning in the man's beard, watching, watching until it burns out against his lips. Baumer - and we ourselves - focus on the cigarette, forgetting the man. Death dehumanizes.

And nothing reflects the carnage like its opposite. Two brimstone butterflies with red spots on their yellow wings appear incongruously in the trenches. "What can they be doing here? There is not a plant nor a flower for miles," Baumer wonders. . . and then watches as the butterflies settle on the teeth of a skull. Remarque conveys the horror and carnage of war - simply and yet graphically - with words the way Goya did with brush.

"Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine guns,

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