The Effects of War

By Paul Simon, Student

A Study of the Effects of War on Paul Baümer in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Harold Krebs in Ernest Hemmingway's "Soldier's Home"

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

An author’s book, while fictional, is usually based on his own experiences. This is clearly the case in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as well as Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home”. The incapability of Paul Baümer and Harold Krebs to return to civilian life parallels the inability of the their respective authors. In Remarque’s case, he did not remain in his native Switzerland for long, but moved to the United States in 1939, where he stayed for the remainder of World War II. His character, Paul Baümer does not live through the war and, therefore, does not have to make post-war decisions similar to Remarque’s. However, Paul does find that life in his native town in Germany is not one that he can return to for any Period of time. He finds that he has, “grown in the army”, and that he has become distanced from his former life as an avid student. Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, found that after the war he could no longer live at home, and thus he moved to Paris in 1921. Here Hemingway developed his “code” for living: don’t think or talk about the upsetting parts of your life; don’t brag about what you have accomplished; make meaningful choices and risks to allow you to live life to the fullest; don’t show your pain publicly because it only makes others feel worse; forgive yourself for your mistakes but do not repeat them; and find comforting place for you where you can live in peace. Through Harold’s struggles to adjust “we see” the code which Hemingway created to enable his survival without fear, among the members of the civilian world. This expatiation is reflected in his short story as Harold Krebs finds that his previous life in unlivable. Therefore, throughout Chapter VII of All Quiet on the Western Front and the story, “Soldier’s Home”, it becomes apparent that the military experiences of Paul Baümer and Harold Krebs, two young men with no real roots in the world, have distanced them from traditional civilian life and traditional civilian ambitions. They find that they are irrevocably divorced from their pre-war lives.
Upon receiving notice that he had gotten leave, Paul Baümer returns home, only to find that his previous life is now very foreign to him. In fact, Paul finds that as he nears his home, “the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar”.(p.154) He also finds that the front has altered his perception of normal civilian life; he notices the roads near his house are, “smooth roads without artillery”.(p.154) and is “startled a couple of times in the street by the screaming of tramcars, which resembles the shriek of a shell coming straight for one”.(p.165) In his inability to leave the war behind, he finds that everything that used to be comforting and part of his normal civilian life is now powerfully distressing: “the staircase fades before my eyes, I support myself with the butt of my rifle against my feet and clench my teeth fiercely but I cannot speak a word, my sister’s call has made me powerless”.(p.157) This is the first sign of separatism that Paul manifests with his family and his civilian home, but many others ensue, to his dismay. The first time he glimpses his home from a distance he says to himself, “You are home, you are home”, only to find that he “cannot feel at home amongst these things…There is a distance, a veil between [Paul and his mother and sister]”.(p.160) He has grown mentally in the battlefield which has been his real home fore the past few years. The home he is returning to is the home of his childhood, a distant memory from the man he has become. He also finds that it is impossible for him to talk of the war with a non-veteran and thus finds himself often lying about his experiences. For example, when his mother asks him, “Was it very bad out there, Paul?”, he has no idea how to communicate the horrors he has seen and thus answers, “No, Mother, not so very”.(p.161) Again, when she asks if the gas was bad, he has no idea how to tell her how they, “once found three enemy trenches with their garrison all stiff as though stricken with apoplexy,…with blue faces, dead”.(p.161) His mother does not understand that she is asking him to break one of the rules of Hemingway’s code: don’t talk about your distressing experiences. After this session his mother stops questioning him about the war, but his father persists: “He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing”.(p.165) Paul knows that it is “too dangerous for [him] to put [his experiences] into words. [He] is afraid they might then become gigantic and [he] will be no longer able to master them”(p.165), which is exactly why Hemingway’s code forbids talking: a soldier cannot master his feelings if he must constantly talk about his horrifying experiences. Paul also discovers that he gets treated like a child: “Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child”.(p.183) His mother has his sister prepare his favorite childhood meal of potato-cakes, and whortleberries. Indeed, Paul is little more than an overgrown child, a fact which he discovers when he dons his old civilian clothes only to find that, “the suit is rather tight and short”.(p.164) He has, “grown in the army”(p.164) physically but also emotionally and therefore is unable to cope with his desire to retreat into a mindless childhood: “Why can I not put my head in [his mother’s] lap and weep? Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled?…indeed I am little more than a child”.(p.183) Not only does Paul find that their is a ‘veil’ between himself and his family but also between himself and his previous civilian life. He finds it especially distressing that he is unable to return to his studies: “[He wants] that quiet rapture again. [He wants] to feel the same powerful nameless urge that [he] used to fell when [he] turned to [his] books”.(p.171) In this wandering of the mind, he realizes that he has lost the “eagerness of [his] youth” and the “impatience of the future” and therefore in essence has lost his ambition for anything in life. The barrier between himself and his youth is permanent and indestructible: “[He] cannot find [his] way back, [he is] shut out through [he entreats] earnestly and [puts] forth all of [his] strength”. Paul soon realizes that his inability to speak to non-veterans is not simply a problem when dealing with his father but also a problem when confronting with the common herd of men: “Occasionally someone speaks to [Paul]. [He does] not delay long for [he has] little inclination to talk”. Paul also begins to understand the reason for his loss of “rapture” for books, as he realizes that it is not just books that he dislikes, but words in General. He believes that words are only half of ones essence. He has taped into his entire essence during battle when he was transformed into a raging animal: “[People] talk too much for [him]. They have worries aims, desires, that [he] cannot comprehend. [he] often [sits] with one of them in them in the little beer garden and [tries] to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this..[they] feel it so too, but only with words…none feels it with his whole essence”.(p.168-9) He comes to one final conclusion about words: “Word, Words, Words - they do not reach [him]”.(p.173) Traditional language cannot express the unthinkable experiences of modern warfare. The chapter ends with Paul’s painful realization that he, “ought never to have come on leave” because it has stolen his two best friends: indifference and hopelessness.
However, Hemingway’s character, Harold Krebs does not have the luxury to return to the battlefield, but must stay at home and try to reestablish his civilian life. Like Paul, Harold finds that he is quite alone with his pain since no one but veterans can understand his experiences and emotions: “He felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about [the war]”. To his utter dismay he soon finds that his parents simply do not really care to hear about the war: “[His mother] often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her attention always wandered. His father was noncommittal”.(p.70) His mother means well by asking him about his war experiences but she is incapable of understanding the realities, and suffering of modern trench warfare since she knows only the docile experiences of a housewife. He found that his neighboring villagers, “had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities” and “to be listened to at all he had to lie”(p.69) which he soon developed a distaste for. Not only does he develop “a distaste for everything thing that had happened to him in the war…because of the lies he had told”(p.69)”, but he also finds that because of his lies the memories, “now lost their cool”.(p.70) These memories become meaningless because he has broken a rule of Hemingway’s code: don’t brag about what you have done. It was only when he met another veteran that, “he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers”(p.70) He also finds that when he returns he simply doesn’t possess the kind of ambition that his parents demand from him; his youthful exuberance seems far from him now. He finds that the girls in his village, “lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it”.(p.71) For him they are more of an abstract idea, than real people: “He did not want [the girls] themselves really”. “He liked to look at them…”(p.71), however, he simply doesn’t have the ambition to court one: “He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her”.(p.71) He wishes that he could have an American girl without all the politics of getting one: “That was the thing about the French girls and German girls. There was not all this talking”(p.71). A factor that plays into his inability to court a girl and into his inability to carry on other normal activities, such as a job, is that, “[Krebs] did not want any consequences”.(p.71) In fact when his mother asks him what he wants to do in life he says, “[He] hadn’t thought about it”(p.73), another display of his total lack of ambition. He doesn’t have the energy to pursue a job, but at the same time, he doesn’t really want one since it means that he would then be responsible to his boss, something he is trying to avoid at all costs. He also finds a job to be repetitive and undoable after the screaming of shells and living each day of one’s life not knowing if one will survive to see the sunrise of the next. While Charley Simmons, a boy of the same age as Harold, “Has a good job and is going to be married”,(p.75) Harold doesn’t want a job and just wants quick sex with no emotional involvement. However, the reason Krebs concludes in the end of the story that he can no longer live amongst his family is that he can no longer wants to have to lie to his mother. When his mother asks, “Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?”,(p.75) he responds that he doesn’t “love anyone”.(p.76) This makes her cry and accordingly he lies to her telling her that he “didn’t mean it”.(p.76) However, it is exactly these politics and lies that he was trying to avoid with the American girls that his mother is now forcing him into. The fact that he needs to lie here, because he “doesn’t love anyone”, shows us that the war has terminated his ability to interact with other human beings in a normal manner. So, at the end of “Soldier’s Home”, Krebs decides that he must leave his home in search of a place with no consequences or lies; Krebs decides that he will go to his sister’s softball game, “before he [gets] away”(p.77)
In conclusion, the military experiences of Paul Baümer and Harold Krebs, leave them forever disconnected from their pre-war, making a return to their civilian pre-war lives impossible. In fact the boys share many common experiences upon their returns to home. Both boys grow tremendously throughout the war, a fact that their families do not appreciate and therefore continue to treat them as children. They also both find the reserve and Repetition of civilian life to be tedious and something that neither one wishes to return to. Paul even exclaims that the daily lives of these people are “so narrow, how can that fill a man’s life, he ought to smash it to bits; how can they do it, while out at the front the splinters are whining over the shell-holes…. They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand”.(p.169) Both men find that upon their return home they can not break their habit of engaging in frivolous activities such as playing cards or talking on lighter matters: “Krebs was sleeping late in bed, getting up to walk down to the library to get a book, eating lunch at home, reading on the front porch…[and spending] the hottest hours of the day in the cool dark of the pool room”.(p.70) The “cool dark pool room” from “Soldier’s Home” is a place for Krebs to get away from the civilian population which Krebs finds vexing at best. This is Krebs’ “clean well-lighted place” that Hemingway insists that we all must find. Paul too finds the he “[prefers] to be alone, so that no one troubles [him]”.(p.168) They find themselves becoming more and more isolated from their worlds because they are unable to find people, with whom they can discuss their horrifying war experiences. In Krebs’ case his parents are uninterested ands so is the rest of the town. Paul, too finds that he cannot tell his mother the truth about his experiences and that the villagers only want to here the propaganda that has been fed to them by German newspapers. However, the most important reason for their inability to assimilate back into civilian society were their tragic ware experiences. Thus, throughout both stories the returning soldiers find that they can not return to the tediousness of civilian life after living years of their life wondering whether they would see the light of the next day.