World War II – October 2019

76 WORLD WAR II

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IT IS COMMON TO CRITICIZE the victors of the First World War

for their failure to recognize the menace of Nazi Germany and

strangle it while it was still in its early stages. It’s true that the

statesmen of the Allied nations miscalculated badly, but underpin-

ning those miscalculations was a pervasive belief that the Great War

had been a massive mistake that destroyed a whole generation of

youth to little purpose. No popular work of art illustrates this mind-

set more than the Hollywood film All Quiet on the Western Front,

released in 1930 to great acclaim—including

the Academy Award for Best Picture.

The film was so stark and powerful that

decades later it would inf luence director

Steven Spielberg when he made Saving Private

Ryan, often considered the most realistic

war movie ever made. Lewis Milestone, who

directed All Quiet on the Western Front, used

over 2,000 extras and acres of California

ranchland, much of it blasted by dynamite to

resemble the shell craters of No Man’s Land.

At the film’s core is a German company made

up of young men—most of them just high

school students—who f lock to the colors in

1914, convinced of the old lie, “It is sweet and

fitting to die for one’s country.” All Quiet on

the Western Front disabuses its audience of

that belief at the very outset; the preface

informs them, “This story is neither an accu-

sation nor a confession, and least of all 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....”

And the movie does just that. Seen primar-

ily from character Paul Bäumer’s point of view

(Lew Ayres), All Quiet on the Western Front

portrays a group of soldiers whose lives con-

sist almost entirely of mud, hunger, terror,

wounds, and death. They have no idea of the

reasons for the war nor the rationale for

the things they must do—mostly fighting the

French to seize or hold a few shell-blasted

acres of farmland whose possession is mean-

ingless. Soon they have more in common with

their foes than with the civilians back home,

who still embrace an outmoded belief in glory

and victory and actually denounce Bäumer

when he goes home on leave and tries to tell

them the truth about the war.

Midway through the film, a scene occurs in

which Bäumer plunges into a shell crater for

safety, followed almost immediately by a

French infantryman who does the same.

Bäumer knifes him in self-defense, then

spends a sleepless night hearing the mortally

wounded soldier gasp for breath. Bäumer

regrets what he has done, tries in vain to com-

fort the man, and promises to write his wife

and take care of his children—all the while

thinking aloud about the purposelessness of

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BATTLE FILMS

BY MARK GRIMSLEY

MEANINGLESS

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