1Given the romantic image of the war hero which prevailed in the 19^th century in Western culture, it is usually understood that the war experience of World War I caused a crisis of this gendered representation of heroism. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front (published in 1928 and immediately translated into English in 1929) is one among several war novels such as the French Le Feu by Henri Barbusse or Hemingway’s fiction which questioned this representation and contributed to the birth of its antithesis, the anti-hero who sees all discourse on heroism as a manipulation of soldiers by politicians and industrial barons. This new male hero values life rather than death and holds a conscientious objector’s political stance: he believes in courage, love and generosity but moves away from the 19^th century ethical model. As this chapter wishes to argue, as far as the traditional division of the soul from the body is concerned, with World War I it is abandoned in favour of a view of the body as the seat of consciousness and the sharing of sensations with other living beings. Lewis Milestone’s 1930 film and Remarque’s 1928 novel are committed to this change in the portrait of the male hero, which this chapter will hopefully show. The comparison between the novel and the film will document the study of the processes at work in the redefinition of the male hero as a modern anti-hero. Moreover, as this chapter argues, a more general redefinition of man was actually coming to light, which was grounded on the tenets of the then developing experimental psychology. The shift from a soul vs body ideology of man to a definition of man as an experiencing body was shared at the turn of the century by William James’s work on pragmatism, Bergson’s 1896 Matter and Memory, and more generally the rising interest in experimental psychology and phenomenology. The novel and the film testify to this new definition of man by the prevalent aesthetics and ethics of both works in their account of the historical wreckage of the bodies as well as the minds of the survivors. If Paul Baumer does not survive the war, the novel is about his life and the experience of survival because his schoolmates die before him; his death, as it were, only brings to an end the story of his life and survival in both novel and film.

Looking for a new idiom in the novel and in the film

2An intertitle before the credits in Milestone’s film reads as follows:

This story is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war… [opening title of film].

3We are told which literary genres are discarded and what is being done instead, i.e., the testimonial of a fact: the ‘destruction of a generation of men who survived’ the tragedy. This oxymoronic formula which is the exact quote from Remarque’s own Prologue, underlines the new connotations of the word ‘destruction’ which will not be used as a sign of disappearance but rather as the sign of the creation of a new human being, not unlike the living dead in Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu.

4Defining the genre of the film is in keeping with Remarque’s own quest of a proper idiom for his war novel – the word “story” stands for its original equivalent “book”. The tone remains neutral and avoids the rhetoric of indictment which had made Emile Zola’s defence of Dreyfus famous, refusing the connivance with reader and viewer alike which a first-person narrative induces. But even more emphatically discarded is the adventure story and the cult of male heroes of adventure stories, as the European colonial wars or the American conquest of the Frontier had encouraged. The key word is ‘death’ and the challenge is a reconsideration of the act of killing another human being, as well as the necessity of facing one’s own death, while the word ‘death’ itself no longer means the elimination of a physical body but rather the destruction of a civilised human being. The choice of a neutral vocabulary – “try”, “simply”, or “tell” – redefines the rhetorical approach of the film – and its source novel –within the reporter’s matter-of-fact statement of events. The noncommittal prose of the war reporter was a style favoured by writers such as Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme, Tolstoï in War and Peace and Stephen Crane in Red Badge of Courage, and a major characteristic of Ernest Hemingway’s prose, in order to make statements about war as a meaningless butchery. Moreover, it will be argued that the emphasis on the psychological damage suffered by the men is also an explicit reference to the new interest in psychology – i.e., the encounter between sensations and consciousness through perceptions and affects.

5The novel uses two different discursive strategies which overlap or intercut in the text. The reader is confronted with the autobiographical writing of a German soldier during the First World War, Paul Baumer, addressing us ten years later and telling us what he remembers having gone through: this strategy gives to the descriptions of scenes the authenticity of a first-hand witness, but never as a confident. On the contrary our ignorance is assumed, and the soldier’s trench warfare experience is presented to us as entirely new and quite unheard of. However, the discourse also shifts into a narration in the present tense telling us what is taking place at the time when it happens, a strategy in which the narrating voice is limited to statements making us share the experience of the protagonists. 

6Milestone’s film chooses the latter type of discourse with a documentary camera recording in the present time scenes which unravel before our eyes and ears: there are no flashbacks nor any attempt to screen the main character Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres)’s memories. The difference between dreams and reality which is rendered in the novel by the hero’s memories is only present in the film in early scenes which are not in the novel. We are shown the manipulation of the boys’ emotions by their teacher Kantorek and the arousal of the crowd’s emotion by the staging of military parades and their forceful music in the town centre. This opening sequence of the film also adds the insertion of two shots which show the dreams of the boys imagining themselves as war heroes: Paul’s friend Kammerich imagines he is exhibiting his uniform to his parents, and another boy sees himself as a general seated in a limousine parading in a crowded street. These opening minutes of the film depict the widely accepted romantic image of the war hero as well as the manipulation which creates it. Another boy is in tears, suggesting to us his is the more natural reaction to the future which is planned for them.

7Details concerning Milestone’s screenplay show the film is rife with silent cinema devices at a moment of the history of cinema when sound film had just become dominant in the film industry (1927-1930). The script met with difficulties when Milestone disagreed with the first draft. The filmmaker’s research for the right atmosphere is transparent in his complaint that such a script changed the scope and point of Remarque’s book; he accordingly “threshed out the rough outline of the existing film” (Canham 78). This can be seen as a sign of Milestone’s awareness of the impact of Remarque’s then rather new type of ‘anti-hero’, the sensitive but tough youth whose former certainties are thoroughly shattered.

8The parallel quest for an appropriate literary idiom as far as the First World War was concerned has indeed been a major crisis in Western culture. As Paul Fussell writes, “the Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world, where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable” (Fussell 21). The change is described by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms: “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (Hemingway 195). But within the new concern for concrete material objects such as villages, roads, or regiments, it is their disappearance which the experience of trench warfare actually occasioned. In All Quiet on the Western Front, when Paul comes back to his school, he is asked to speak of his life on the front but remains speechless. Fussell proceeds to give several quotes referring to the failure of language to render the lived bodily experience: “noise never stopped for one moment – ever”, the look of the front is “utterly indescribable’, “the smell rising from the bloated bodies was beyond description” (H.H. Cooper in Fussell 170). Louis Simpson explains: “To a foot soldier, war is almost entirely physical, that is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it absolutely- the dead” (Simpson in Fussell 170). Alexander Aitken writes of the sights and sounds in the Somme in September 1916: 

The road here and the ground to either side were strewn with bodies, some motionless, some not. Cries and groans, prayers, imprecations, reached me. I leave it to the sensitive imagination; I once wrote it all down, only to discover that horror, truthfully described, weakens to the merely clinical (Fussell 174).

9While silencing the autobiographical narrative voice, Milestone relies on strategies which had become familiar to silent cinema viewers, among which the two forms of identification for the spectator provided by the camera eye: primary identification (Jost 33) when the scene unravels under our eyes and we become unacknowledged ‘voyeurs’, and secondary identification when we identify with an on-screen observer-character. Such complementary strategies were used in order to make lived experience ‘speak for itself’ depending on each spectator’s individual reaction. Already Münsterberg (1916) had grounded his discussion of film reception on the camera’s way of focusing our attention on a significant detail and activating our cognitive capacities of memory-images and anticipation-images along with the arousing of our emotion.

The topic of both novel and film: lived experience

10In the opening sequence of the film, characters turning their backs to the camera in foreground stand for spectators within the fiction and they are shown reacting to a military parade, the march down the main street of a German regiment along with its cavalry. A woman is seen waving her hand at them and throwing flowers. The brisk tempo of the parade in step with the military music stimulate the crowd’s enthusiasm, and houses with additional people cheering from their balconies are seen in the background. They wave their arms at the camera, so to speak, which adds to our sense of being present in the scene. The emphasis on the act of seeing and hearing is then transposed indoors to a classroom and its open windows. The reframing of the street scene by the windows takes place as the parade turns left and marches under them. The teacher’s voice – Professor Kantorek –as he is seen lecturing in front of his blackboard is altogether inaudible, which suggests that the diegetic music is deafening. 

11However, Kantorek soon regains control of his audience and we identify with what the youths in the classroom are going through. His face is enthused, and his words express a fanatic desire to hypnotise his pupils into ‘Iron Men’ (i.e. the boys whom we discover listening to him as the camera pulls back). The military music was already heard as non-diegetic music for the ‘main title’, so that we were already immersed in a military atmosphere. But once it is naturalised by the street parade it expresses the general excitement as well as the systematic transformation of men into disciplined automatons. Such a mutation is then shown to possess the boys themselves: their secondary school years have come to an end and their teacher is capitalising on the street show (open windows) in order to make them enlist. The use of close-ups – also straight from silent cinema- shows the teacher’s face growing bigger and bigger in the frame and in reverse shots the boys’ eyes looking straight into his own. They are then portrayed separately in close ups as they stand up and say, “I’ll go”, “I’m going”. The repetitive rhythm of the military music which has been replaced by the rhythm of the teacher’s loud vehement harangue is now echoed by the repetitive editing of each boy’s head and shoulders as he stands up and utters his phrase. As they leave the schoolroom, they fling their copy books into the air and march towards the door singing a national anthem not without having written “Nach Paris” over the Latin and Greek verse which they had been studying [08:00]. This is when a new critical distance takes hold of us and we grow suddenly aware that they have been manipulated to respond to a fanatic’s dream of conquest. The following sequence shows them entering the buildings into a large courtyard where platoons are practicing military exercises, and we are made to anticipate that they will be turned into ‘perfect soldiers’, i.e., ‘machines’ [09:36].

12As has been noticed, the film uses forms of visual narrative which are part of the transition between the silent period and the oncoming general use of sound film. Hitchcock’s own 1929 Blackmail is often hailed as a sound film which uses the typical visual language of the highly sophisticated editing and lighting visuals of cinema from the 1910s onwards. In Milestone’s film, which was shot first as a silent film in a similar manner, i.e., with a view to making it into a sound film for screenings in sound-equipped cinema theatres, one can easily figure out intertitles for Kantorek’s harangue and the boys’ individual response, just as the main title preceding the credits shows. Given the particular conditions of production, silent pantomime is an interesting aspect of the film. As we have seen, the opening sequences of the street and the school underline the mesmerising process through the wild gesturing of the crowd in long shots, or, in close shots, the petrified faces of the young men as well as their automatic imitation of one another, standing up like wired puppets. The craft of pantomime gives a strong visual vividness to the scene, while it also contributes to the rendering of their encounter with the real world of action, and therefore bears the stamp of their emotions and dreams. The film’s final image of Paul watching a butterfly while on the watch in his dug-out relies more than ever on close-shots in order to underline the expressivity of his gaze and of his outstretched hand as icons of the modern definition of a human being, i.e., a sensitive body caught in a moment of attention, when memories and dreams as well as affects give it a pulsation (Merleau-Ponty 240-282). Therefore, the actor’s pantomime serves two purposes in the film. On the one hand, it conveys the use of human bodies as ‘cannon fodder’ by conditioning them into machines – assuming as it were that their essence lies in their souls and thus escapes unscathed from their dismembered bodies. On the other hand, pantomime conveys the unity of man’s being by depicting his body through his senses as an interface between his inner life and the life in the outer world. 

13As the action of the film unravels, we are shown the men’s transformation into unthinking automatons as they are taught to forget their education and incorporate a military stance [16:28] at the training camp. The only rule they are told about is immediate obedience either in standing to attention or in throwing themselves on their bellies in a field of mud [14:10]. The endless repetition of the exercises until they no longer express disgust or fatigue is made more palpable by the caricature of military behaviour in the person of their officer, former postman Himmelstross. The latter is now given authority over the young men, and he clearly oversteps his duties to the point of sadism.

14As to life on the front, it proves to be no different from this robotlike transformation, as shown when they line up in the rain or when they are transported at night in lorries to the front line to put barbed wire in the no man’s land opposite the enemy trenches. They are merely small cogs in a huge machinery orchestrating chaos. The film uses a visual metaphor to render the mechanical activity of the platoons on the front: outdoor views of simultaneous scenes – such as homes being blown up, trains transporting troops or wounded men – are all superimposed in a high angle view from a large window; at first, we expect to discover someone watching, but this does not take place [19:52–21:07]. Rather we move from closer shots of soldiers back to this window frame several times, to the point of suggesting the grid or the web of a mechanical process orchestrating scenes of utter chaos.

15Later, we are shown the first battle from a high angle, and we understand that none of the soldiers can share such a view of the general confrontation between the two armies [44:02–50:08]. This serves to emphasise by contrast the ignorance in which they are carefully kept within the narrow space to which they are confined inside a dug-out in a trench. We are now faced with a different contact with the war causing fear and trauma. The only order they must obey is to remain hidden from the enemy, which is incompatible with heroic dreams. Simultaneously we discover that comradeship is part of their lives since the orderly has allowed some five or six of the former schoolmates to remain together. Under the stress of confinement in their dug-out, we are shown normal reactions of fear and in parallel the psychically damaged boys whose nerves are out of control (tears, shaking, laughing), [28:31] later diagnosed as ‘shell-shock’ (Kaes 3) in parallel with hysteria, a female symptom diagnosed by Charcot in La Salpêtrière (Gordon 129–133).

16In the novel, the narrator describes the discovery that one is not a superior idealised human being but a human body reacting to the surrounding presence of other forms of life, by emphasising the proximity of ‘low’ animal forms: vermin such as lice, fleas, and rats. Conversely the loss of high or noble and intelligent, animal species such as horses proceeds from an understanding of the human being’s various ways of experiencing the life of the body; either as the source of suffering, or as the power to enjoy beauty. The paragraphs on the horses being hit and having to be shot in the novel – though absent from the film – are paralleled with a later one when Kat is tempted to shoot a very young boy who is badly wounded in the stomach.

The main tenets of phenomenology

17Let us now put things the other way round: instead of following what the novel and the film tell us, let us look at what phenomenology tells us about the living being in general. It will be assumed that the deconstruction of the war hero image by the film (and the novel) uses this global approach of all living beings, among which the human being is no exception, as an implicit ideological innovation already relevant in the 1900s. Four fundamental ways in which the body of the living being, understood as an organ, perceptively engages it/him/her in the world have been summed up by Vivian Sobchack as follows: the perceptive body is the bearer of an orientational point O (as its centre), it serves as technology which gives us several sensory fields, by its corporeal unity it synthetises several sensory fields as the place on and in which sensations are spread out, and it actualises action by the striving of consciousness, volition, gesture, and language (Sobchack 84).

18In the film, we have scenes of confrontation in which the men’s bodies perceptively engage them in these four fundamental ways – among which the eye is foremost as Merleau-Ponty argues when giving the example of the blind subject who uses a cane to materialise his/her mental image of the world; gestures prolong our eye contact (Merleau-Ponty 260–264). In this respect, when the camera focuses on Paul’s hand stretching out towards a photograph of a female dancer, or later towards a butterfly, we are shown the oriented intentionality, the living organ of sensory fields of vision and touch, the unity of the whole body in the gesture and the intense consciousness which is heightened by the opportunity of recovering full contact with the world.

19What military training has brought about was meant to have an impact on the ways in which the body perceptively engages us in the world, and to cause the destruction of any kind of reaction which might endanger the discipline of the platoon. As to the life on the front, it contributes to another form of destruction of the soldiers’ sensory capacities by an even more violent aggression upon their senses. Looking at these from a phenomenological point of view, it will now be suggested that one can list effects of life at the front upon the men.

20The control of one’s body’s space-time organisation is restricted by the lack of any orientational point. The soldiers are deprived of any general information on the progress of the battle, the targets, or the plans by their officers. As a result, the only sense of direction allowed to them is the knowledge of the presence of a parallel trench ahead, either one’s own front line or the enemy’s line. Instead of information about maps and topography, the soldiers find absence of direction in a space which has metamorphosed into shapeless matter – earth, or rather mud – a feature which increases with the succeeding attacks and withdrawals from the two parties.

21The soldiers’ several sensory fields are restricted to the perception of immediate events such as gunfire, shells, explosions, obstruction (barbed wires), or fire and rockets. In the film, a use of distinct pantomimes (André 24) shows normal fear VS trauma and shell-shock, upsetting the corporeal unity synthesising several sensory fields as the place on and in which sensations are spread out.

22The organ which actualises action by the striving of consciousness, volition, gesture, language is impaired by the restriction of perceptions to sheer sounds in the dark. Their mental activity is deprived of the necessary anticipation of the source of sounds by vision. For example, we see close-ups of Paul’s face as it twitches in an agony of powerless lack of information about what is going on outside when he is hiding in a grave.

23This psychological damage is rendered by major differences in the cinematography of the two battles where Paul finds himself. The first battle hardly ever shows Paul’s point of view, as said above, but rather high angles of the French assault, the fighting in the German trench, and the French going further on. The Germans escape to another trench from which they use heavy fire which causes the French to retreat and go back across the first German trench into their own and then turn round and use their own machine guns as the now attacking Germans attempt to come near them. Our overview of the action shows the tragedy of trench warfare, that is to say its domination by industrial armament and the carnage it causes in both armies with no progress on either side. Paul’s presence in the action is disseminated in the succession of scenes as if he were one of the anonymous men moving from one trench to another.

24The second battle experienced by Paul is shown from his viewpoint as he hides in a grave [1:15]. We are shown the strong restrictions of his perception as instances of a re-definition of human nature – and of the male hero. His capacity to interact with the surrounding movement in the outer world is redefined by the visual metaphor of the grave where he seeks shelter under an emptied coffin. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.” (Merleau-Ponty 235)

25Again, we see French soldiers jump from hole to hole, but the camera being underneath them, the attack is thus shot from Paul’s low angle point of view, creating secondary identification for the viewer (Jost 33). This time the theme of entrapment is given a new emphasis. In the novel we have a detailed description of the episode, and of the way Paul’s mental images are the product of his physical experience of his surroundings. The scene takes place after Paul’s first leave, as he volunteers to be sent out on a patrol (Remarque 209). He loses his way in the darkness of the night, all shell holes looking alike in the light of a parachute star-shell. 

26The ‘orientation’ capacity of the war hero is shown as his sole competence, his senses being his only weapon, so to speak. The narrative is in the present tense: “I can no longer remember the direction. […] A shell crashes. Almost immediately two others. And then it begins in earnest. A bombardment. Machine-guns rattle… I lie motionless- somewhere, something clanks, it stamps and stumbles nearer… it clatters over me and away… the crash of the shells bursts in my ears… the machine-gun rattles.” (Remarque 213–215)

27The source novel reads as a detailed script and directions for the actor’s pantomime, and the actor’s face and body cringe and shake with each sound of rattling machine guns, or the stamping of the soldiers above him when jumping from hole to hole in their attack. But we are not shown the entire process of mental images which form in his mind in the novel. Rather the screen image of these detailed psychological descriptions is restricted to a minimalist rendering of gesturing. It is the striking contrast between the minimalist style of the bodily expression and the intensity of the shocks which are inflicted to the body and mind which affects the film viewer; we are made to empathise with a body and its mind which have been deprived of all protection and suffer the extreme violence of the outer world events from our seats in the dark. The loss of speech and representation is fully achieved in these battle scenes. There is no question of an image of a war hero anymore in the process, and the return to ordinary social life comes as a shock to us as much as it does to the protagonist, an experience for which we/he are no longer prepared.

Society and the individual as a cultural construct 

28The novel and the film depict the gendered body of the war hero as a cultural construct. The confrontation with the civilians’ ordinary life being presented after our experience of the battlefront, the artificiality of such a cultural construct is very convincing. While in the film Paul Baumer comes home on leave after having been wounded with his friend Albert and having spent some time in a Catholic hospital [103:57], which makes his return home a logical conclusion, in the novel he is suddenly sent on leave without being given any explanation or preparation, and is also told he will – for no apparent reason – have to go to a Russian prisoners’ camp for training, a suddenness which underscores the violence of the difference he will be faced with. In the novel, he does go on a second leave after being wounded with Albert and writes that his second leave was worse than the first one. This repetition in the novel enhances the conservatism of the middle-class society which we discover during his first leave. The film also uses repetition but with a difference, since during his single leave Paul goes to see Kantorek who is still the same at his former school, so that the added opening sequence is echoed by his confrontation with the latter’s immutable rigidity. 

29The war hero is a social being whose representations of his own image are given to him by his education and family as well as institutions. The gendered body results from the body as a perception which constructs meaning by codes in use within its social world. “The essential body is always also a qualified body. Cultural and historical practices always both generalize and discriminate in relation to the lived body” (Sobchack 144) by marked and unmarked semantic paradigms. Such is the representation of the German society in the film (as well as in the novel), but instead of a pragmatic view of such social realities, both the novel and the film only select social traits that signify the new and irretrievable differences which characterise the ‘destroyed survivor’ as an individual by antithesis. 

30The 1916 German society is depicted in the film [1:46] as a very conservative one: women are confined to housework such as cooking and sewing, and men meet freely in public places to have beer and smoke cigars while talking about the war from the newspapers they read [1:50]. They argue about the movement of troops and the right decisions as if playing a game of chess. We are shown a 19^th century society separating men and women, as depicted in many naturalist novels of that era. The men have a stereotyped view of manhood: in the novel Paul’s father asks him if he has been fighting in close combat and when Paul says that no, he has not, his father feels his son is a failure. He hoped for heroic tales which the other men expected of him. In the film, inserts in the opening sequence show two dreams of boys (as mentioned above): the image of themselves which is shown on the screen is the product of social codes and the daydreaming emphasises their artificiality. We are shown one boy imagining himself meeting his parents, i.e., the origin of the stereotype he fancies: his mother starts crying (women are weak), but his father looks very pleased and proud of him (men are heroes). The other imagined scene by another boy shows him in triumph with two women sitting close to him in the car (the male hero in uniform is a sex icon).

31In the film when Paul goes back to his school, his teacher Kantorek greets him as a hero – he is wearing his uniform – but Paul realizes he is unable to find the words he is expected to say. He has grown into an adult who has been destroyed by suffering and this makes him different from the social image which his former teacher fantasises. The young boys express their disgust with what they call his cowardice, but for us this misunderstanding depicts the difference between a knowledgeable individual and the automatons whose views about the iconic war hero or ‘iron men’ have been taught by society, i.e. their teacher Kantorek. The use of one’s intelligence and knowledge has been utterly transformed by experience: knowledge now is that of material reality, in which the body occupies the centre. His lines in the film dialogue explicitly express left-wing anti-war ideology.

32Addressing the boys:

“I can’t tell you anything you don’t know. We live in trenches out there, we fight, we try not to be killed, sometimes we are. That’s all” […] “There are millions out there dying for their country. And what good is it? It’s easier to say ‘go out and die’ than it is to do it.”

33Addressing Kantorek:

“I heard your same old stuff… making more iron men, more young heroes. You still think it’s beautiful and sweet to die for your country, don’t you? We used to think you knew. The first bombardment taught us better. It’s dirty and painful to die for your country…. It’s better not to die at all. Our bodies are earth, our thoughts are clay. I can’t stand it here- I’ll go back tomorrow.” [111:53–113:09]

34He begins by a statement about where he is speaking from, the world of material reality with little room for idealism. What he has to say is something none of the boys are ever told. He underlines the failure of nationalist politics by mentioning the number of casualties, instead of victories over the enemy, and condemns the accepted view that children are sacrificed by adults as unfair to the younger generations. When addressing Kantorek, he accuses him of lying and promoting a cultural construct which is perverse and morbid. He then gives his own knowledge and his new motto in favour of life rather than death. But his last words express his despair in front of the difference he feels between himself and his audience. This is a clear statement of what had already become by 1928 a political discourse charging society for destroying a generation, meaning not only causing their death but more significantly destroying their culture – Goethe, Schiller are quoted as Paul Baumer’s literary ideals – and their language: now Paul cannot use words which have become meaningless for him. The presence in both novel and film of an episode of romance highlights the political anti-war ideology by inserting an anti-climactic scene of ideal peace in natural surroundings. Significantly the men must undress and cross a river – the river Lethe – to enjoy this short moment of happiness.

A problematic scene of romance within a general redefinition of genders?

35In Remarque’s novel and in the film, a pause in the rear front shows three German soldiers and three French country girls coming across each other on either side of a canal. After waving in each other’s direction as a sign of agreement, the boys swim across at night to meet them [87:28]. They manage to bring food for the starving girls living on burnt down land where crops have long stopped being grown for lack of farm hands and because of bombing. The boys appear in the cultural role of the food provider of urban industrial life, or even as the hunters bringing wild game home to their family, in a context which we know is quite the opposite, since girls have replaced boys in factories, while women in the country have taken up farming chores normally in the care of the men such as hoeing and sowing. The boys also make love to the girls, a deed which is naturalised by the mutual consent of either party – there is no suggestion of the stereotyped view of the soldier as rapist and poacher. 

36In both the novel and the film this episode is introduced as a form of relief and anti-climax by its classical literary form as a sentimental comedy. However, it is also significant as a gendered view of society. In this episode the men recover their independence of mind, and the girls also show little inhibition. They begin by deriding the boys but eventually agree to welcome them when the latter promise to bring food with them. In both film and novel, their relationship is not described in explicit sexual detail but rather in a symbolic and sublimated manner. The stereotype of the war hero as sexually superior is therefore deconstructed and mutual consent between the opposite sexes is emphasised: in the dialogue the women make no display of vanity or stupidity, they are natural and greet the men with simplicity, both parties knowing they are enjoying a brief respite in a war which has turned their life into hell. For this reason, it is relevant to turn to Iris Young’s discussion of the female body1 in the early 20^th century western society, recognizable by readers and audiences alike.

37The hypothesis which will be submitted in the ensuing lines is grounded on a striking similitude between the restrictions of bodily movement which trench warfare inflicted upon the men in 1914-1918 and those inflicted upon women, which Iris Young describes as the ‘female lived-body’, by the modern urban society already dominant by the 1910s and therefore shared by female audiences of the film. Interestingly, Iris Young uses a phenomenological description to trace “some of the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space” in “women situated in contemporary, advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society” (Sobchack 151). 

38From the point of view of this chapter, the experience of soldiers in trench warfare is that of a similar ‘lived-body’: they are spectators watching the enemy and aware that when they move forward outside the trench, they become the target of their enemies’ own observation and machine guns. In Young’s analysis, such traits are typical of women’s behaviour in society rather than men’s. Insofar as such cultural codes are characteristic of the urban 19^th and 20^th centuries, it is interesting to see that they stigmatise the feminine part of society.

39Young describes certain observable and rather ordinary ways in which women in modern urban society typically move differently from the ways that men do. Phenomenology of purposive action reveals the bodily schema in the formation of women’s experience of their surroundings. These are part of the paradigm of cultural differences and in no way attributable to biological difference, or to some inherent feminine or masculine “nature”. For Young they are the result of historical and cultural factors. Young then defines these differences as follows: 

The three modalities of feminine motility are that feminine movement exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings. A source of these contradictory modalities is the bodily self-reference of feminine comportment, which derives from the woman’s experience of her body as a thing at the same time as she experiences it as a capacity (Young 58, in Sobchack 153). 

40By ‘ambiguous transcendence’,2 we are to understand that, unsure of her physical capacities, the woman often lives her body as a burden, which must be dragged and prodded along, and at the same time protected. The ‘destroyed’ World Wat I soldier betrays a similar insecurity in his relation to the formerly ordinary world: Paul no longer feels he is understood by the civilians he comes across during his leave and clearly ‘lives his body as a burden’. While in the romantic idyll he successfully shares with his French partner he is his old self – i.e., tender and courteous.

41By ‘inhibited intentionality’, Young means the conflict between the feminine lived body’s inherent “I can” and the same body’s acculturated “I cannot”. Although any lived body has to deal with the contradiction between intention and the world’s resistance, the woman experiences it as the very structure of her intentional aims. Because Paul shows signs of such a contradiction since he must only obey orders and is expected to restrict his competence to becoming a thing, an inorganic agent not unlike a projectile among other projectiles, we understand that it is the ‘normal’ soldier, not the shell-shocked sick soldier, who has suffered ‘destruction’.

42‘Discontinuous unity’ means that women are seen performing their bodies only in part(s) rather than as a whole relative to certain motor tasks, and women’s motion is discontinuous with itself. Again the ‘destroyed’ survivor suffers such a disunity in his performance, as shown when on duty on watch, careful to appear as motionless as the earth of the trench or the shell hole, looking dead but being alive.

43By being deprived of transcendence, intentionality and unity, the lived-body of the soldier of trench warfare in the accounts of the First World War is in an oddly similar situation to that of modern women in an urban society: “an essential part of the situation of being a woman is that of living the ever present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention” (Young 66, in Sobchack 157). The soldier in both the novel and the film is shown to experience a very similar situation: he is gazed at as a mere body, a mechanical thing, as shape and flesh that a potential other, i.e. society at war and its delegates, officers for instance, manipulate and exploit.

44The phenomenological approach of ‘the sense of being a mere thing’ explains what the women cited by Iris Young complain about, and the similar feeling of the soldiers who are being victimised by the Himmelstrosses (Remarque 23-26, 82) and Kantoreks (Remarque 174) of this world. However, the issue is also that of the redefinition of gender as a cultural object; in the debate between the war hero cult and the emergence of a redefinition of the hero as anti-hero, it might be said that the degrading experience of becoming a mere thing, or ‘cannon-fodder’ is part of the emergence of a new cultural construct, the image of the anti-hero. The comparison between novel and film in that light shows more of this requalifying of the male gender.

Novel VS film: an interpretation of some structural changes

45There are some significant changes in the script regarding the order of events which can be read in this light. At first view these seem to be justified by the silencing of the voice-over and autobiographical discourse, but they might also signify a more important difference between the novel’s explicitly left-wing ideology and the ideology of the film grounded on the concept of ‘care’ as will be argued. The changes in the narrative introduce a debate in which the central character achieves something like an initiation to full adult maturity in the film while in the novel the character essentially expresses the shattering of values such as honour, courage, and sacrifice. In both cases, the loss of identity and suggestions of being a mere thing–in a 1900 Kantian world where the difference between human beings and animals or things is their soul–can be discussed as the loss of their status as icons, i.e., as cultural constructs or objects.

46In the film, as in the novel, horror culminates when Paul kills a man with a knife. It is a pivotal moment in the construction of the image of the male hero. The scene deconstructs the social view of a fearless fighter and replaces this view by the biblical scene of Cain murdering Abel, constructing a new image of war as fratricide.

47The scene of entrapment in the grave is followed by another form of entrapment but this time it also includes action on Paul’s part. Having been lying in a shell hole under heavy artillery fire, Paul comes face to face with a French soldier and kills him in close hand to hand combat using his knife. But, after stabbing him, Paul cannot escape from his shell-hole but must wait until the enemy dies throughout a night and a day: he eventually suffers deep grief and begs for forgiveness, as if he were a criminal. Killing has become murder (Remarque 216–229). The end of chapter 9 insists on the shift of the enemy from a thing, ‘something’ (Remarque 216) to a ‘body’ or ‘object’ in the sense of a cultural construct, which Paul strikes at with his knife and which ‘suddenly convulses, then becomes limp, and collapses”, i.e., first an enemy then a comrade and finally a man with an identity and a family, i.e., a full range of cultural constructs instead of a ‘thing’. What this climactic scene is about is not impersonal war (“war is war” says Kat to comfort Paul) but the confrontation between Paul Baumer and Gérard Duval.

48The comparison between the novel and the film shows a significant displacement of this climactic scene. It is situated in the novel in chapter 9, after Paul’s leave and after his night in the company of a French girl across the river. When during his leave, his father wants to know if he has killed someone in close combat and Paul says no, the full significance of the act of killing for the older generation is clearly the achieving of an initiation ritual. In the film, it takes place in the middle of the film [75:00], is immediately followed by the meeting of the French girls [82:00] and Paul only goes home once, after having been wounded and having left Albert by himself a cripple in the hospital [103:57]. Clearly the novel may be read differently from the film in this dramatic episode. In the novel (Remarque 216–225) it is crowned by Paul joining his company and agreeing with his ‘mentor’ Katczinsky after telling him about the death of the Frenchman, that all things considered, “war is war” (Remarque 229). During their next and last meeting Kat is shot dead (Remarque 290) and Paul meets his own death (Remarque 296). By linking the close combat experience with the end of the novel and Paul’s death, it may be understood as an indication of the new ideology about war which the novel vindicates: while for Paul’s father killing an enemy in a hand to hand fight means the recognition of the soldier as a war hero, for Paul himself there are two other readings: one is the helpless statement that war and killing are one and the same thing, but the other is clearly a redefinition of the killer as murderer, as underscored by Paul’s final statement: “I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval” (Remarque 225). The anti-hero is given a capacity to see the value of life as such and his tears arouse our empathy due to the conversion from innocence to experience which we have witnessed. This is his signature as it were, since the novel then draws to its end. By displacing this episode much earlier in the narrative in the script, it no longer has this significance but rather falls within the modern ‘anti-hero’ picture as a character who can still enjoy life with the French girls and must wait until he gets home for the first and only time before becoming fully aware of his psychic metamorphosis. Realising he is a stranger among his own people, he returns to the front to seek another form of integration among comrades, only to meet their deaths and his own. By a structural change, i.e., a displacement in the order of significant events, the film redefines the war hero as an anti-hero who has no other future than a continuous living experience of consciousness. Moreover, as will be discussed below, the ultimate metaphor of the butterfly serves as a signature to the new anti-war ideology.

49There is another important difference between the novel and the film in the characterisation of the main protagonist. In the novel he does not stand out as a heroic figure, but rather as a nearly anonymous witness sharing the other young men’s experience while in the film the characterisation of the protagonist is rather different. Because the actor who was cast for the part of Paul Baumer (Lew Ayres) is strikingly handsome – his clear-cut features and elegant silhouette appeal to the spectator’s eye – he is more likely to win our empathy in the film. Katczinsky’s part was given to Louis Wolheim as a foil to Lew Ayres’s good looks, but also as a hugely impressive impersonation of the very type of the ‘know-how’ and immensely generous anonymous hero. The latter is the antithesis of the Kantoreks and Himmelstrosses of both novel and film, in the sense that he empathises with the other men of the platoon, and also has a ‘sixth sense’ for practical everyday life details such as finding proper food, suitable shelter during their moments of relief; he also gives advice about fighting to the young recruits, and can even strike some of them to keep them from acting foolishly. Kat is given the role of the father figure and leader whom the young men entering the adult world sorely lack (Paul’s father in the novel and the film is dismissed as part of the sadly inadequate adult burghers of his hometown).

50This privileged relationship is given a particular emphasis in the very last scenes showing the two ‘heroes’ together. The fall of the Herculean hero and the rise of the modern antihero and the new value, ‘care’, which fuses the feminine and the masculine, are visualised in two symbolic shots devoted to the comradeship which Paul Baumer and Kat develop when sharing the experience of death. Sacrifice is no longer heroism but useless suffering since war will not help people in their everyday struggle – for example townhouses and farmhouses are destroyed and girls on a farm left without food. As Paul recovers from the shock of killing the French soldier, the framing chosen for his intimacy with Kat [82:00] tells a tale of motherly care and shows Kat as a family man, ready to help his comrades and guide the younger ones, finding food for everyone but also at ease with his role as a soldier. A second even more telling image of their relationship is when the camera frames Paul carrying the wounded Kat on his back. While it is immediately reminiscent of a classical icon: Eneas carrying his old father Anchise and saving him from the flames of burning Troy, it is laden with a more complex symbolic significance since in Remarque’s novel and Milestone’s film, Kat is killed when a plane shoots them from above, and he thus saves Paul’s own life temporarily. It is not self-sacrifice which is emphasised, but mutual care. Though both are reduced to mere things moving in the wasteland which draws the enemy pilot’s attention and causes him to circle round and aim at them, we can foresee by that time that they might have avoided such a destiny by lying down like dead bodies, i.e., yet another thing image. Instead, by standing and caring for each other, they become emblems of a new cultural construct, the anti-hero.

The butterfly metaphor (All Quiet on the Western Front, Milestone, 1930)

Conclusion

51Such is indeed how the modern anti-hero, Paul, meets his death: by caring for a butterfly which momentarily sits on a rock outside his trench. Instead of focusing on a potential enemy in the waste land, he allows his gaze to rest on the butterfly twitching its wings to keep its balance as it pauses from a life of constant motion. This momentary pause in Paul’s watch as a soldier is in keeping with his character. We have already seen Paul in situations in which he cares for the living beings around him: watching a bird on a window sill (in the novel and in the colour remake by Delbert Mann (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1980), or when admiring a female dancer on a poster before meeting the young French woman across the river. By framing the reverse shots of Paul’s hand which he stretches out towards the butterfly vs the French sniper aiming at his fully exposed body – both novel and film are careful to tell us he has risen and he is standing erect – the sequence encapsulates several moments of both works which focus on the rendering of Paul’s sensitiveness as the essential quality which characterises him and which he shares with Kat. The metaphor of life is embodied here by a (wild) butterfly which leads its own life using its senses – eyes, antennae – to seek food and expanding its body (wings) to develop its access to its surroundings. It reminds us of points which have been made earlier, mainly that “all lived bodies share existence and the world under similar conditions [they] are material, intentional, motile and finitely and perspectivally (sic) situated. All lived bodies are organs of perception...” (a clear reference to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in Sobchack 159). Seen within the definition of man by phenomenology, an approach which, as has been recalled, is fully relevant since the new cognitive sciences are the exact contemporary of the Great War catastrophe, it has been suggested that the film uses cinematography and pantomime to render this contemporary philosophical and psychological ideology. Remarque uses silence to bring his novel to an end: “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.” (Remarque 296), while Lewis Milestone’s screenplay adds the butterfly sequence to frame Paul’s hand in a life-giving gesture of love before becoming perfectly still. 

52By culminating in the creation of the butterfly metaphor to express the valuing of life over death, the film redefines the deconstructed hero cult image into an icon of the anti-hero caring for life. With the choice of a butterfly, a living being in between the material and the human world, the film also challenges the dichotomy between the non-human and the human, and interestingly addresses the issue of yet another dichotomy, things vs objects, i.e., cultural constructs. By re-defining the romantic male war hero into a modern male anti-hero, the telling of the World War I experience of the destruction of a generation contributed to the modern image of male identity. Though Hollywood cinema has had little use for this peace-loving hero in harmony with nature…