All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque 

We have become wild beasts.  We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.  - Chapter 6 
 
Over 100 years have passed since the conclusion of WWI, often considered the first modern war, with the utilization of large-scale chemical warfare, barbwire, machine guns, artillery, airplanes, and submarines.  It was also one of the deadliest wars in history with estimates ranging over 8 million to upwards of 65 million casualties.  Final numbers are impossible for simple reasons as accounting methodology differences between historians, or the matter of unaccounted civilian and military personnel.  This was long before CPU spreadsheets and rapid documentation, after all.
 
Mustard gas was introduced in WWI as a weapon.  It's a horrible substance.  Besides causing massive and grotesque blisters and burns many hours after exposure, it's also mutagenic and carcinogenic, inducing rapid mutations of normal DNA.  If mustard gas exposure didn't kill someone within the first few days, it most likely caused permanent disability or disease later in life. 
 
Chlorine gas was also pioneered as a weapon.  Concentrated inhalation can cause death within a few minutes from pulmonary edema.  The German scientist Fritz Haber, one of the founders of the Fritz-Haber ammonia synthesis process, was promoted to head of the Chemistry Section within the Ministry of War for his deep understanding of chemistry.  During the war, he was the architect behind the utilization of chlorine gas barrels on the front lines, aimed at the allied forces.  However, chlorine gas is noticeably green, thus, although maintaining a density greater than air, allied forces were able to spot the chlorine gas moving toward them with the winds.  The few times Haber attempted to use chlorine gas against his enemies resulted in few causalities.

The use of toxic gases as a weapon magnified but didn't encompass the entirety of the cruelty in WWI.  Indeed, the strategies employed, irrespective of the gases, forced men to endure weeks and months in damp and dirty rat-filled trenches.  Illnesses, and borderline starvation of the soldiers manning these trenches, were common occurrences.  Men with serious injuries often returned to battle after receiving medical care.  Paul Baumer, the main character in All Quiet on the Western Front, witnesses men with no jaws or stumps for legs battling on the front lines.  Despite devastating prior injuries, they return to exploding artillery shells, tangled barbwire, and lines of bullets shredding bodies and scarring the battlefield.  Baumer sees new recruits, petrified by the cacophony of gunfire and artillery, quickly slain.  The lucky ones soon learn simple tricks to avoid the same fate: artillery shell craters are good cover as they rarely hit the same spot twice, dead bodies can be used as shields, etc.  
 
Through Baumer we experience the tapestry of WWI's most heinous features.  In a particular battle scene mid-novel, he is faced with hand-to-hand combat with an enemy soldier.  Crouching in an artillery crater to avoid gunfire, another soldier falls on him.  Without knowing who, or with which army - Axis or Allies - Baumer thrusts his bayonet toward the body, "Just as I'm about to turn around a little, something heavy stumbles, and with a crash a body falls over me into the shell-hole, slips down, and lies across me - 
 
"I do not think at all, I make no decision - strike madly at home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp, and collapses.  When I recover myself, my hand is sticky and wet.  
 
"The man gurgles.  It sounds to me as though he bellows, every gasping breath is like a cry, a thunder - but it is not only my heart pounding.  I want to stop his mouth, stuff it with earth, stab him again, he must be quiet, he is betraying me; now at last I regain control of myself, but have suddenly become so feeble that I cannot any more lift my hand against him.
 
"So I crawl away to the farthest corner and stay there, my eyes glued on him, my hand grasping the knife - ready, if he stirs, to spring at him again.  But he won't do so any more, I can hear that already in his gurgling."
 
Soon after the shelling and gunfire subsides, "It is early morning, clear and grey.  The gurgling continues, I stop my ears, but soon take my fingers away again, because then I cannot hear the other sound.
 
"The figure opposite me moves.  I shrink together and involuntarily look at it.  Then my eyes remain glued to it.  A man with small pointed beard lies there; his head rests helplessly upon it.  The other hand lies on his chest, it is bloody.
 
"He is dead, I say to myself, he must be dead, he doesn't feel anything any more; it is only the body that is gurgling there.  Then the head tries to raise itself, for a moment the groaning becomes louder, his forehead sinks back upon his arm.  The man is not dead, he is dying, but he is not dead.  I drag myself toward him, hesitate, support myself on my hands, creep a bit farther, wait, again a terrible journey.  At last I am beside him.  

"Then he opens his eyes.  He must have heard me, for he gazes at me with a look of utter terror.  The body lies still, but in the eyes there is such an extraordinary expression of fright that for a moment I think they have power enough to carry the body off with them.  Hundreds of miles away with one bound.  They body is still perfectly still, without a sound, the gurgle has ceased, but the eyes cry out, yell, all the life is gathered together in them for one tremendous effort to flee, gathered together there in a dreadful terror of death, of me.
 
"My legs give way and I drop on my elbows.  'No, no,' I whisper.
 
"The eyes follow me.  I am powerless to move so long as they are there.
 
"Then his hand slips slowly from his breast, only a little bit, it sinks just a few inches, but this movement breaks the power of the eyes.  I bend forward, shake my head and whisper: 'No, no, no,' I raise one hand, I must show him that I want to help him, I stroke his forehead.
 
"They eyes shrink back as the hand comes, then they lose their stare, the eyelids droop lower, the tension is past.  I open his collar and place his head more comfortably...
 
"These hours....The gurgling starts again - but how slowly a man dies!  For this I know - he cannot be saved, I have indeed, tried to tell myself that he will be, but at noon this pretence breaks down and melts before his groans.  If only I had not lost my revolver crawling about, I would shoot him.  Stab him I cannot. 
 
"By noon I am groping on the outer limits of reason.  Hunger devours me, I could almost weep for something to eat, I cannot struggle against it.  Again and again I fetch water for the dying man and drink some myself.  
 
"This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing.  Kat and Kropp and Muller have experienced it already, when they have hit someone; it happens to many, in hand-to-hand fighting especially - 
 
"But every gasp lays my heart bare.  This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.  
 
"I would give much if he would but stay alive.  It is hard to lie here and to have to see and hear him.
 
"In the afternoon, about three, he is dead...

"My state is getting worse, I can no longer control my thoughts.  What would his wife look like?  Like the little brunette on the other side of the canal?  Does she belong to me now?  Perhaps by this act she becomes mine.  I wish Kantorek were sitting here beside me.  If my mother could see me-...
 
"The silence spreads.  I talk and must talk.  So I speak to him and say to him: 'Comrade, I did not want to kill you.  If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too.  But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response.  It was that abstraction I stabbed.  But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.  I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of you rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship.  Forgive me, comrade.  We always see it too late.  Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?  If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert.  Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up - take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now...
 
"'I will write your wife,' I say hastily to the dead man, 'I will write her, she must hear it from me, I will tell her everything I have told you, she shall not suffer, I will help her, and your parents too, and your child -'...
 
"Irresolutely I take the wallet in my hand...
 
"There are portraits of a woman and a little girl, small amateur photographs taken against an ivy-clad wall.  Along with them are letters.  I take them out and try to read them.  Most of it I do not understand, it is so hard to decipher and I scarcely know any French.  But each word I translate pierces me like a shot in the chest; - like a stab in the chest.  
 
"My brain is taxed beyond endurance.  But I realize this much, that I will never dare to write to these people as I intended.  Impossible.  I look at the portraits once more; they are clearly not rich people.  I might send them money anonymously if I earn anything later on.  I seize upon that, it is at least something to hold on to.  This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to placate him - and deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it is a little stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will see to it.  So I open the book and read slowly: - Gerard Duval, compositor.  
 
"With the dead man's pencil I write the address on an envelope, then swiftly thrust everything back into his tunic.  
 
"I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval.  I must be a printer, I think confusedly, be a printer, printer - ."
 
Baumer's personal oath to honor Duval's death after the war never comes to fruition.  The tricks and skills can only take a soldier so far - eventually luck runs out for most.  In a war like WWI, a grand maw of decimation churning and churning scores of young faceless men, there are no winners on the battlefields.  After the numbers are tallied by the bookkeepers and policy makers, and the new borders are drawn up, the fallout of loss and tragedy persists in the soils and families generations to come.  For the faceless men like Buamer and Duval, unknown to everyone except their battlefield comrades and the ones in their wallet portraits, death as sacrifice comes as the final repose in the face of the bombarding horrors of war.

By the end of the story, Baumer finds his repose, "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.  
 
"He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping.  Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."  
 
        
 
Summary:  A straightforward first-hand account of the realities, camaraderie, and tragedies of WWI.  Despite the short length, by the end of the story any reader will be hard-pressed to not feel troubled and afflicted with heartache.         
 
Rating:  9.0

-E.B.
 2019-06-16