The latest film from Edward Berger, based on the book by Erich Maria Remarque, is a stunning achievement. The world this cast and crew have created is so incredibly immediate it threatens to pull you into the sludge with it. Volker Bertelmann’s visceral score is sublime. Stories like this are essential counterpoint to other much-loved films that offer up death and destruction simply as entertainment.
“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not 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 shells, were destroyed by the war.”
– Erich Maria Remarque
I have subsequently been drawn back to the work of Wilfred Owen, a British poet who was killed in action, aged twenty-five, just one week before the armistice was declared ending World War I…his imagery is that much more harrowing:
Dulce et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
(Latin phrase is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”)
Jeffrey Mundell 