Do you remember what it was like to be 18 years old?
I think most people should be 18 years old sitting in the classroom listening to the teacher's lectures, immersed in hard reading every day for the upcoming college entrance examination, then think that this life is too hard. But recently watched "No War on the Western Front", watched those high school students who were only 18 years old and were going to go to the battlefield, and only then did they know how happy they were?
We're just beginning to love life, but we have to shoot at everything.
This is a sentence from the cover of "No War on the Western Front", written by Erich Maria Remarque, who was born into a German family and fought in World War I at the age of 18.
In this book, the author uses the perspective of First Person Paul to intuitively tell the cruelty of the First World War.
The protagonist, Paul, is a high school student in Germany, who and his classmates volunteered to join the army at the instigation of the militant teacher, and after experiencing the horrors of war on the Western Front, all of them eventually died on the battlefield.
Paul Ben, 18, was in physical education class with his classmates, but the teacher encouraged them to volunteer for the army. But later, when they arrived at the front line, they learned that the teacher had not let his son sign up for the army.
The first dead man they saw on the battlefield was his classmate Bem. Bem's death directly shattered Paul's faith and filled him with disappointment in his teacher.
He felt that the teacher should have led them to a better future, even though they had teased and ridiculed him, but in his bones he still thought that the teacher was an authority, but he did not expect that the teacher had led them to a road of no return.
When one of their classmates named Kemurray was injured and had a leg amputated, Paul asked the doctor to hurry up and see it, but the doctor complained that he had had 5 legs amputated today, one after another, and had hung 16, and Kemurray was the 17th, and he should hang 20 today.
Hearing these numbers, he didn't want to scold people, because he was so desperate, he just wanted to fall down and never get up again.
The war that followed became more and more brutal, the war became more and more fierce, and everything was destroyed by shells. Paul had nowhere to hide, they could only hide in coffins, fearing the shells long before the corpses, for it was the dead who had saved their lives.
The war made them more and more crazy, and in order to keep themselves alive, they had to fight. He said that even if the enemy had their own biological father, they would not hesitate to throw a grenade at him in the chest.
Because if he doesn't annihilate these enemy forces, they will certainly annihilate themselves. They should have loved life, but in order to survive, they had to make themselves more ferocious than the enemy, and they had to shoot at everything.
They are like abandoned children who begin to believe nothing but the grenades in their hands.
They had only been on the battlefield for a year, and they were already veterans, more experienced than those who didn't know anything. Veterans sacrifice one, recruits sacrifice ten. Watching the recruits sacrifice more and more, they began to teach these recruits how to protect themselves when the shells were thrown.
Although the battlefield is merciless, they are good after all, so they are willing to lend a helping hand to these recruits so that they can survive.
The food on the front lines was tight and poor, with boiled kale, dirty carrots, moldy potatoes, and rice soup without a few grains of rice. The prisoners of war who were captured by them had nothing to eat, and could only rummage through the dirty swill water.
Paul observed the faces of the captives, but they were honest peasants, and he looked at them begging very sadly, so he secretly broke his paper cigarette into two pieces and distributed it to the Russians.
They should have been friends, but because of a command, they put each other on opposite sides and became enemies. But though he was an enemy, Paul still pitied these people from the bottom of his heart, and he wanted to help them.
This is probably the goodness of human nature, war is indeed cruel, but these children still yearn for beauty in their hearts, hoping that everyone can let go of their hostility to each other and live happily.
Paul was wounded on the battlefield, and he and the rest of the wounded were to be taken by train to the hospital. He saw the snow-white linen sheets in the carriage, and he thought that his clothes had been worn for six weeks, and he was afraid that he would sleep on them and dirty such a clean sheet.
A Red Cross nurse encouraged him: "You can all lie in the trenches of the front line, and of course we can wash a sheet."
What touched me the most in the whole book was what the nurse said, because only she really respected the warriors who were fighting for them.
No one really cares about the lives of these children, they can only huddle together to keep warm. Although the battlefield is cruel, they are all helping each other, hoping that the other can survive.
But Paul's classmates, friends, and even his most admired company commander were killed on the battlefield.
When Carter was hit in the bone by a bullet, Paul helped him to get back to the hospital as soon as possible, but the gunfire was too fierce. When he managed to carry Carter back to the medical station, he laughed, thinking that Carter was finally saved.
But the health soldier told him that he could have saved some effort because Carter had already died. Paul didn't believe it, he thought Carter had just fainted because they were still talking ten minutes earlier.
But then he saw that the back of Carter's head was full of blood, and it turned out that when they were on the road, Carter was shot in the head, leaving a small hole.
Carter's sacrifice was too much of a blow to Paul, because of the seven veterans in their class, he was the only one left.
Two months after Carter's death, Paul was also finally killed on the battlefield. However, the commander of the army recorded only one sentence in the war report: there was no war on the Western Front.
This sentence easily erases all the sacrifices of all people, and since there is no war on the Western Front, there is no so-called sacrifice. Sometimes what is more terrible than war is the evil of human nature.
No War on the Western Front ¥30.75 Purchase
Although Paul was sacrificed, the author of the book was fortunate to survive the war. He wrote down his experiences, recounting the generation that had been ruined by the war. The book, while not condemning the militants, is also a desire for peace.