This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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If you want an inkling of the carnage happening right now on the steppes of Ukraine, you could do worse than watch the new German film of All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix. 

It opens with a blood-curdling evocation of the industrial scale of modern warfare. We see countless corpses collected from the battlefield, like carcasses in a meat factory. Their uniforms are removed, washed and repaired by rows of seamstresses. Then they are sent home freshly laundered, to be issued to the next cohort of raw recruits — who have no idea that they are wearing the uniforms of the dead.

Strategy, tactics and technology have moved on hugely in the century since the First World War, but the human reality of conflict remains as visceral as ever. War is still the same muddy, bloody and barbaric business.

Even though the death toll in Ukraine does not yet compare with the millions lost from 1914 to 1918, in both wars most of the casualties have been inflicted by artillery. In the film the soldiers find a naked, legless corpse hanging high on a tree. One asks: “What happened there?” “Blown out of his uniform.”

All Quiet on the Western Front offers a distinctively German perspective. Two and a half hours with subtitles might sound like heavy going, but this is a great war film, in the class of Das Boot or Downfall. 

The prevailing British narrative of the Great War since the 1920s is encapsulated in the war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s The General: “‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack/ As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack./But he did for them both with his plan of attack.”

This film also has a callous general — a sadistic amalgam of Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the warlords of the German High Command — who orders his troops to attack even in the final minutes before the guns fall silent. He is contrasted with Matthias Erzberger, a decent politician who capitulates to bring the slaughter to an end. The generals approved the armistice, then blamed those who signed it as traitors. And so the black legend of the “stab in the back” began, later exploited by the Nazis.

This historical framing is aimed at a German audience who know little of the First World War, memories of which were blotted out by the Second. For most Germans, war is murder and generals are mere butchers. The implicit pacifism of this film reflects the explicit pacifism of present-day Germany.

For the British, war is altogether more complicated

For the British, war is altogether more complicated. We trust our generals more than our politicians. While we respect genuine conscientious objectors, we certainly don’t trust the left-wing extremists who march under the banner of pacifism. The “Anti-War” brigade protested endlessly over Iraq, but see Ukraine as a lost cause, thereby siding with Putin. 

The British believe that war is sometimes necessary. In 1982, the German media ridiculed Margaret Thatcher’s decision to wrest back the Falklands from the Argentinian dictatorship. Virtually the only exception was the late Karl Heinz Bohrer, a German newspaper correspondent in London, who warned his compatriots that she was right — and would win.

Yet the British, too, easily fall into the trap of an unthinking pacifism. Despite Remembrance Day — instituted to honour the war dead — in popular culture, the reasons why nearly a million young men from Britain and the Empire went to die in France and Flanders have been largely forgotten. What we remember is, in the words of Wilfred Owen, “the pity of War”.

There was, in fact, a vitally important principle at stake

Yet there was, in fact, a vitally important principle at stake. The Kaiser’s Germany, like Putin’s Russia, had attacked not only France, our ally, but also Belgium, a neutral country which Britain was bound by treaty to defend. The Germans occupied large parts of both countries and even by the end of the war, the Allies had still not recaptured all their territory.

Both Kaiser Wilhelm and Vladimir Putin gambled on a quick victory, but found themselves fighting a war of attrition instead. Russia is being squeezed by sanctions — though not to the point of malnutrition, as Germany was by the Allied blockade. Most democracies endure better than autocracies: in war, as in peace, consent matters.

Even so the West, too, is in denial about its lack of leadership. As for the German elite: too many have been either in awe of the Kremlin or in its pay. Some wars are just, but pacific Germans are so averse to this fact of life that they have disarmed themselves — and are denying Ukrainians the means of liberation. Ordinary Germans wish they could turn the clocks back to that miraculous moment when the Berlin Wall fell. Now Zelensky reminds them that Putin has rebuilt the Wall in Ukraine. It’s an unpalatable message.

The new film of All Quiet on the Western Front, directed by Edward Berger, is based on the eponymous novel by Erich Maria Remarque, perhaps the most celebrated of all the literary works to emerge from the Great War. 

It was that rarest of books: a classic and an instant bestseller. More than one and a half million copies flew off the shelves, devoured both by traumatised veterans and others curious to relive their ordeal. 

What made All Quiet on the Western Front so popular was that it was not an anti-war tract, but a shockingly factual description of life in the trenches: in Remarque’s words, “an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war — even those of it who survived the shelling.”

The story is a universal one: a group of classmates go to war, inspired by a bombastic headmaster. Later, when they know better, Paul Bäumer (the protagonist in the film and narrator in the book) dismisses the head’s empty praise of them as “the iron youth”, exclaiming bitterly: “Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old people now.”

Perhaps the most powerful scene in the new film comes when Paul finds himself alone in a shell hole with a Frenchman. In a frenzy, he stabs his enemy, but is then forced to watch him slowly dying in agony. The shattering realisation dawns that this man is like himself. Paul tries to make amends by dressing his victim’s wounds, then vows to find his wife and family. It is too late: the foe he now longs to befriend is dead.

Within a year of its publication in 1929, Remarque’s book had been adapted by the Hollywood director Lewis Milestone to become one of the first great talkies. Overnight, Remarque found himself the richest but also the most controversial author in Germany. 

All Quiet symbolised everything that Hitler hated. He had built his entire career on the myth of his own highly-decorated front line service. And here was a novel that depicted the front line soldier as anything but heroic. 

In reality, Hitler was no war hero. Indeed, his account in Mein Kampf is a tissue of lies. As a dispatch runner — a non-combat role which enabled him to establish connections with officers — Hitler would have been far more likely to receive the Iron Cross than the front-line soldier he pretended to be. 

True, in the Battle of the Somme he was slightly wounded in the thigh — hence the Colonel Bogey words: “Hitler has only got one ball.” But he had been in a dugout, far behind the front line. And when he was gassed during the final British offensive in October 1918, it was a small dose. He claimed to have been temporarily blinded, but historians now think that his symptoms were psychosomatic. In any case, he was invalided out to safety. Hitler was obsequious to his superiors, who ensured that he survived the war.

By contrast, Remarque was so badly wounded at Passchendaele in 1917 that he never saw action again. He was denigrated by the Nazis for this long convalescence and they cast doubt on his veracity because he had been a sapper rather than a front-line soldier. Yet while in hospital he collected vital material for the novel from many other wounded men.

On the day that hitler came to power in 1933, Remarque fled Germany — just in time to miss seeing his book being burned by the Nazis.

Remarque himself was denounced by the Nazis as a pacifist and a communist. They also claimed he was Jewish, because he had supposedly changed the original form of his name (Remark) to hide the fact that it spelled “Krämer” (“peddler”) backwards. None of this was true. Such conspiracy theories went hand in hand with attempts by Goebbels to tempt him to return. He refused: for him, Germany was no longer home.

In 1943, the Nazis took revenge on Remarque. His sister Elfriede, a dressmaker in Dresden, was overheard saying that the war was lost. She was denounced, tried and executed for the “crime” of undermining morale.

In exile, Remarque never repeated the success of All Quiet on the Western Front. However, he did turn out to be attractive to women, including his fellow German émigrée Marlene Dietrich. In a three-year affair with the actress and singer, he lived the dream of many millions of servicemen (on both sides) during the Second World War.

The novel has lasted well, thanks to the simplicity of its language and its poignant depiction of youthful camaraderie. This new and harrowing cinematic version of All Quiet on the Western Front reminds us that evil men exist who worship war. They must at all costs be deterred. That task requires military strength and statesmanship, not appeasement or pacifism.