All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

   1929; 291 pages.  Book 1 (of 2) in the “All Quiet on the Western Front” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Highbrow Lit; German Literature; War Fiction; World War 1.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    World War One.  The Great War.  The War to end all Wars.  What image comes into your head when you hear those phrases?

 

    Probably you envision American (or British, or French) soldiers, huddled in a long trench replete with pools of stagnant water, all wearing helmets and looking up at the camera with miserable eyes.

 

    Alternatively, you might picture those soldiers climbing out of the trench, rifles in hand, all wearing gas masks (there was no griping about constitutional rights back then), preparing to throw themselves across a mine-laden no-man’s land, knowing that many of them are about to die, and carried out to gain a couple of yards of meaningless muck.  Could life get any worse than this?

 

    Well, yeah.  You could be a German soldier, in a sopping-wet trench, with a gas mask on, in the same miserable conditions, but outmanned and outgunned, and having to face all those charging doughboys.

 

What’s To Like...

    When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front was an immediate hit in the United States despite the fact that the war had been over for more than a decade.  It was subsequently made into a movie twice, once in 1930, then again in 1979.  Although fictional, the book is based upon the author’s own front-line war experiences in 1917.

 

    The story is told in the first-person POV, that of 19-year-old Paul Baumer, who, along with his fellow German soldiers tries to cope with horrendous battle conditions, heavy casualties, incompetent officers, well-meaning but clueless civilians, and the required blind loyalty to a futile cause.

 

    Despite being a translation (by A.W. Wheen) from the original German, the writing is powerful.  You can feel the terror and despair when the German lines are bombed or shelled: there is no escape from it; you just hope that the explosives don’t happen to fall on you.  Your life is in the hands of a few trusted comrades; when one of them dies it is crushing.  Duties such as guarding Russian prisoners-of-war are gut-wrenching because you can empathize more with those fellow sufferers than with your own military and political leaders. Even getting to go back to your hometown on leave doesn’t relieve the stress (PTSD hadn’t been discovered yet) because your family and friends cannot possibly  understands what you’re going through and you desperately don't want to talk about it.  

 

    The missions Paul goes on further emphasize his wretched situation.  Laying down barbed wire is a life-threatening affair, since it by definition means you’re on the front lines.  Going on patrol means risking getting separated from your comrades, being stuck in a shell hole in no man’s land, and praying that the next person that drops into your tiny shelter is a friend, not an enemy.  Keep your gas mask with you at all times, learn how to quickly yet properly put it on, and for heaven's sake, don't take it off too soon.

 

     There are a few blessed moments of brightness.  At one point Paul and his comrades manage to find some female companionship.  It involves considerable risk and some bartering (civilians trapped on the front lines are starving too), but provides a brief but much-needed relief from the fighting.  At another point, Paul, wounded and confined to a stretcher, is embarrassed as he tries to find a way to tell a cute nurse that he needs to take a leak.  I had to google an obscure reference to a salty quote from Goethe’s “Gotz von Berlichingen”, but it was surprisingly easy to find and made me chuckle.

 

     The ending is easy to anticipate, but it nevertheless left a lump in my throat.  Unfortunately for Paul, there aren’t any plot twists, and the final resolution almost brings a sense of relief.  The title reference doesn’t occur until the final page, and isn’t a direct translation: in German, it is “Im westen nichts neues” which literally means “Nothing new in the west”.  All Quiet on the Western Front is a standalone novel, although I learned there is a sequel.

 

Excerpts...

    Morning is come.  The explosions of mines mingles with the gun-fire.  That is the most dementing convulsion of all.  The whole region where they go up becomes one grave.

    The reliefs go out, the observers stagger in, covered with dirt, and trembling.  One lies down in silence in the corner and eats, the other, a reservist-reinforcement, sobs; twice he had been flung over the parapet by the blast of the explosions without getting any more than shell-shock.

    The recruits are eyeing him.  We must watch them, these things are catching, already some lips begin to quiver.  (pg. 105)

 

    “Almost all of us are simple folk.  And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks.  Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us?  No, it is merely the rulers.  I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us.  They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

    “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

    Kat shrugs his shoulders.  “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

    “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.  (pg. 207)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Importune (v.) : to harass (someone) persistently for or to do something.

Others: Perambulator (n., British); Dixie (n.); Baldaquin (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 6,049 ratings and 1,996 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 386,474 ratings and 12,221 reviews.

 

“We are losing the war because we can salute too well.”  (pg. 39)

    There’s not much to quibble about in All Quiet on the Western Front.  The tone is dark and grim, yet has very few cusswords: I counted only four “damns” through the first quarter of the book, proving once again that great writers can get their message across with only a paucity of vulgarity.

 

    The translation is from German to "English", not  "American", so I occasionally encountered weird things like bathing-drawers, lorries, nerve-centres, and a carcase.  Yet distances were given in miles, not metres, so maybe the translation was into Canadian.

    Also, please be advised that horses played a major role in World War One, and inevitably suffered major casualties as well. 

 

    All Quiet on the Western Front conveys a sobering message about the horrors of war and the need to resort to it only as a last resort.  The fact that we witness this through the eyes of an enemy soldier just makes it all that more powerful.  It is easy to see why this book became an instant classic.

 

    9 Stars.  Reading All Quiet on the Western Front enables me to reach my yearly goals for reading both “Highbrow Literature” (at least one per annum) and “Banned Books” (also at least one per annum).  The latter one is a bit of a stretch, since the countries that banned it were Nazi Germany (for the rather obvious reason of portraying the Fatherland in a bad light); and Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy (all of which objected to its “anti-war” theme).  AFAIK, it was not banned here in the US.

Dead Wake - Erik Larson

   2015; 359 pages.  Full Title: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing Of The Lusitania.  New Author? : No.   Genre : Non-Fiction; History; World War 1; Ships.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    Everything I know about the Lusitania comes from history classes, either in high school or college.  Here’s what I remember from those classes.

    The sinking of the Lusitania caused an outrage in America that immediately caused us to enter World War 1 on the side of the British and French.  Since we did that in 1917, that means the Lusitania was sunk in 1917 as well.

    It was torpedoed by a German U-boat.  There were two giant explosions.  The Germans say that proves the luxury liner was secretly carrying ammunition from the US to England.  The British say it proves that the U-boat fired not one, but two torpedoes, those dirty dogs.

    The Lusitania was an American ship, so the sinking of it was an act of war.  The attack took place somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  There were some survivors, but a lot of passengers died because there weren’t enough lifeboats.  Most of them were Americans.

    Hmm.  Strangely enough, the only true statement in those last three paragraphs is that the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

What’s To Like...

    Dead Wake is Erik Larson’s most recent book, and is a departure from his usual style of interweaving two disparate stories, such as in The Devil  in the White City, where he tells about the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago (which showcased the a marvelous invention called the Ferris wheel), and a detective's dogged hunt for a serial killer named H.H. Holmes.  Here, no such blending takes place, but the POV does skip around from the perspectives of the U-boat, the Lusitania, President Woodrow Wilson in Washington DC, and Room 40  in London, the headquarters for British Intelligence during the First World War.

    Larson divides the book into five sections, arranged chronologically, and chronicling the voyages of both vessels.  They are :

Part 1. (pg 5) Bloody Monkeys (background and pre-voyage preparations)
Part 2.  (pg 133) Jump Rope and Caviar (the voyages themselves)

Part 3. (pg. 215) Dead Wake (the paths of the two ships meet)

Part 4. (pg. 245) The Black Soul  (the torpedoing, sinking, and rescue efforts)

Part 5.  (pg. 315) The Sea of Secrets  (the aftermath and consequences)

    The torpedo impact takes place at 2:10 PM on May 07, 1915, which, book-wise, is on page 247.  You might think that means a whole bunch of boring pre-explosion stuff to slog through, but Erik Larson did meticulous researching into the lives of the various passengers and crewmen, and their lives and intertwining fates makes for fascinating reading.

    The book isn’t overly technical, but I enjoyed learning about the U-boat technology of World War 1.  Submarines were viewed as a joke at the beginning of the war.  They were small, their torpedoes had a 60% fail rate, and their batteries needed charging frequently.  But after they sank a couple British warships, they developed into a deadly threat.  Indeed, it led to an official British policy forbidding any of their large warships from being dispatched to rescue survivors from a torpedoed ship.  This would have a grave impact when the Lusitania went down.

    As usual, Erik Larson throws all sorts of details and trivia into the account.  Arthur Conan Doyle writes a fictional sub story that turns out to be remarkably prescient.  I learned about the long-forgotten “Straw Hat Day” celebrations.  There’s an eerie quote about the horrors of trench warfare by some German soldier named Adolf Hitler.  And you’ll be amazed by how much coal has to be loaded onto a ship that’s about to embark on a transatlantic voyage.  Overall, it was really neat to get a “feel” for life in the 1910’s – in Germany, in the US, and in England.

    The title is explained on page 241.  The ending is great, which is no small feat since most readers will know ahead of time how things turn out for the Lusitania.  The blame-games played in the aftermath will sadden you.  Winston Churchill, then the Secretary of the Navy, comes across particularly poorly.  The “Epilogue” section is in a “whatever happened to” structure, and I greatly enjoyed  that.  The closing paragraphs (pg. 353) about Theodate Pope’s search for her shipboard friend, Edwin Friend, will bring both a tear and a smile to your face.

    There are no pictures in the book, which was mildly disappointing.  I would’ve liked to see a larger-scale map of the watery areas of interest.  The “extras” in the back of the book include 6 pages of acknowledgements, 58 pages of notes, and an 11-page index.  I highly recommend reading the "Sources and Acknowledgements" section, as it details just how much work goes into writing and publishing a book like this.

Kewlest New Word ...

Sequelae (n., plural) : conditions that are the consequence of a previous disease or injury.

Excerpts...

    Men served as ballast.  In order to quickly level or “dress” his boat, or speed a dive, Schwieger would order crewmen to run to the bow or the stern.  The chaos might at first seem funny, like something from one of the new Keystone Cops films, except for the fact that these maneuvers were executed typically at moments of peril.  U-boats were so sensitive to changes in load that the mere launch of a torpedo required men to shift location to compensate for the sudden loss of weight.  (pg. 121)

    He and Pierpoint swam together.  Turner saw the bodies of the ship’s firemen floating nearby, upside down in their life jackets – he counted forty in all.  Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike.  Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses.  Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies.  Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.”  (pg. 296)

 “If you had to jump six or seven feet, or certainly drown, it is surprising what ‘a hell of a long way’ even older people can jump.”  (pg. 272)

    Dead Wake was a riveting book for me, especially the “what ifs” and the subsequent events.  The British navy tries to make Captain Turner a scapegoat, but instead, you, and Erik Larson, have to ask: Why wasn’t there a destroyer escort for the Lusitania as it approached Liverpool?  After all, it was in a war zone, and Germany had sent out explicit communications that they would sink any and all vessels their U-boats encountered there.

    It should also be noted that, by its own shipping records, the Lusitania was carrying much-needed rifle-carriages and shrapnel shells to England, making it fair game in the conflict.  Still, the popular conspiracy theory that it carried another, secret trove of highly-explosive munitions is pretty much debunked by Larson.

   The actions of the United States are also head-scratching.  No matter what your and my 8^th-grade teacher told you, we didn’t declare war because of this.  The Lusitania was sunk in May 1915.  We didn’t enter the war until two years later (half the duration of the four-year conflict), and that only after our indignation over the infamous “Zimmerman Letter”.  Wiki it, or read this book.  Talk about skewed priorities.

    9½ Stars.  Dead Wake is a fantastic read for history buffs, and I've never yet been disappointed in an Erik Larson book.

    We’ll close with some of the more poignant stats and trivia given in the book.  764 people survived the sinking of the Lusitania, including the ship’s captain, William Turner.  1,195 people died, including 27 of the 33 infants aboard  and 3 German stowaways, who had been caught at departure snooping around, and were incarcerated below-decks.  The bodies of more than 600 passengers were never found.  123 Americans perished.

    The Lusitania was just 16 hours from arriving at its destination when it was torpedoed.  The total time between the impact and sinking: just 18 minutes.  Although each passenger had been issued a life jacket, many of them died because they didn't know how to put it on and/or where they had stashed it in their cabins.  Think about that last piece of trivia the next time you take a cruise and have to participate in the mandatory life jacket drill.