Before today if you googled 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and 'pleasure to go the the front in boots like these', you would only find one website on the Google-accessible planet. Shows how much they know. Well, I'm watching that film for the first time and it is bringing up a number of pleasant ironies. Pleasant for an intellectual, I suppose, but perhaps not so pleasant for a farm boy or a peasant.
The quote comes from one of the young German soldiers in WW1 who dons the pair of expensive imported leather boots that came from a fallen comrade. In the short montage that follows, he is killed and the boots are passed on. That soldier dies and the cycle repeats. The full quote is:
"I don't mind the war now. Be a pleasure to go to the front in boots like these."
This film is a great deal more sentimental than I expected it to be. It appears to be the kind of lesson that today only naive people need to be taught. And yet I have heard in some lecture recently that the romantic notions about war and patriotism were a great deal more commonly held before WW1 than anyone today might imagine. I wish that I could remember the name of the German who essentially invented the phrase, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. But his story intertwines in the evolution of thought regarding masculinity and battle in the West.
Like 'Il Postino' and 'The Bicycle Thief', this movie evokes what I have come to call 'European Innocence', a kind of naivete associated with the provincial ethnics of the world. It's difficult for me to judge the absolute position of these portraits in juxtaposition with American attitudes. Are we the cynical ones and they merely unpolluted, or are their sensitivities hightened for dramatic effect, or am I just a crabby old buster? Hard to say. But in the end I couldn't stand the weeping of this film, and I can generally be moved.
Few things seem so clear in retrospect as to the idiocy of trench warfare tactics. The amount of intelligence brought to the modern battlefield is so overwhelmingly significant now that by comparison the battles of WW1 were shear chaos. The ability to control territory in those days was achingly primitive; one doesnt' need to imagine how far we have advanced. And yet doesn't that advance bring us around towards notions that a small army of Jack Bauers could turn the tide in warfare? Isn't that the new romantic notion? I think it was Thoreau who warned us from becoming tools of our tools. With technology like this...
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