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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