The Most Important Lesson in All Quiet on the Western Front
This powerful, tear-jerking scene from the famous antiwar novel is not of the trenches, no man's land, or the hospitals. It's of a mother's need for the truth.
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Below is an excerpt from All Quiet on the Western Front. I recently finished the book and this passage has stuck with me the most.
This scene takes place while Paul Bäumer (the book’s main character) is home in Germany on leave. During his time at home, he feels it’s his duty to visit the mother of his dear friend Kemmerich who dies early in the book.
Kemmerich’s death was slow. He was shot in the leg and had to have it amputated. Sometime after the operation, Kemmerich dies of his wounds lying in his hospital bed with undried tears on his cheek. Bäumer witnessed the death in person.
But while visiting Kemmerich’s mother, he decides to keep the truth to himself:
I cannot write that down. This quaking, sobbing woman who shakes me and cries out on me: “Why are you living then, when he is dead?” — who drowns me in tears and calls out: “What are you there for at all, child, when you —”— who drops into a chair and wails: “Did you see him? Did you see him then? How did he die?”
I tell her he was shot through the heart and died instantaneously. She looks at me, she doubts me: “You lie. I know better. I have felt how terribly he died. I have heard his voice at night, I have felt his anguish — tell the truth, I want to know it, I must know it.”
“No”, I say, “I was beside him. He died at once.”
She pleads with me gently: “Tell me. You must tell me. I know you want to comfort me, but don’t you see, you torment me far more than if you told me the truth? I cannot bear the uncertainty. Tell me how it was and even though it will be terrible, it will be far better than what I have to think if you don’t.”
I will never tell her, she can make mincemeat out of me first. I pity her, but she strikes me as rather stupid all the same. Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual. So I say rather impatiently: “He died immediately. He felt absolutely nothing at all. His face was quite calm.”
She is silent. Then says slowly: “Will you swear it?”
“Yes.”
“By everything that is sacred to you?”
Good God, what is there that is sacred to me? — such things change pretty quickly with us.
“Yes, he died at once.”
“Are you willing to never come back yourself, if it isn’t true?”
“May I never come back if he wasn’t killed instantaneously.”
I would swear to anything. But she seems to believe me. She moans and weeps steadily. I have to tell how it happened, so I invent a story and I almost believe it myself.
As I leave she kisses me and gives me a picture of him. In his recruit’s uniform he leans on a round rustic table with legs made of birch branches. Behind him a wood is painted on a curtain, and on the table stands a mug of beer.
We see here that Bäumer is totally unwilling to tell the truth about Kemmerich’s death. He seems to believe that his lived experience on the front gives him the right to withhold the truth from a grieving mother. The carnage he’s seen on the front has made him so jaded that there is nothing he won’t swear on. Presumably, Paul would swear on his own mother’s life that Kemmerich died a peaceful death. In a moment of foreshadowing, Bäumer swears on his own life he’s telling the truth.
I think Remarque (the book’s author and WWI veteran) is using hyperbole in this passage to demonstrate a well-established tradition of his time; Soldiers of old rarely, if ever, talked about their experience in combat. If they did, it was usually much later in life. Many seemed to believe they were hiding their experiences for the good of those who were still innocent and unjaded, as Paul does for Kemmerich’s mother here. He tries to shield her from the realities of war. Realities that her son had known. To his credit, there is some mercy in Bäumer’s lie.
I don’t know how Remarque felt about this tradition. Authoring All Quiet on the Western Front suggests (especially considering he wrote it in the 10 years immediately following WWI) that he felt the reality of war needs to be shared. Even though it is a fictional book, it is historically accurate in many ways. Countless scenes from the novel mirror memoirs of other WWI soldiers.
I do know I wholely disagree with Paul Bäumer’s attitude in the above scene. One of the beliefs underlying my antiwar activism is the need for everyone to recognize the realities of war. I believe that if people see war as a solution, it must mean they are unaware of what war truly is.
Bäumer should have told Kemmerich’s mother what happend to her son. She deserved to know how much her son suffered for the popular cause of national pride. Bäumer should have told the entire city of Kemmerich’s fate and how countless others were living through the same at that very moment. He should have told the city leaders, the priests, he should have shouted it in his ultra-nationalist school teacher’s face, and he should have told the press.
Without the knowledge of the realities of war, we can never appropriately determine if going to war is worth it. Are the pros of war worth the cons? How can we answer that question without knowing the truth about the cons? In my opinion, if everyone was intimately aware of how agonizing war is for those who live through it, no one would see it as a viable solution, no matter the problem.