Julia Schwartz
December 27, 2000
Comparative Essay- War
How does one maintain a sense of control over oneself during a war? What are the aspects of life that one needs to control? Many of the characters created by John Knowles in A Separate Peace and Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front are conflicted with finding their morals in chaotic times of war. They find themselves constantly thrust into an abyss of emotional hurdles necessary to leap when their friends are taken away from them and life as they know it is suddenly changed time and again. While mastering a continual game of running from Death, they must uphold friendships, a sense of self, and a mentality of a set enemy, aided by the tranquility of nature. Scrambling to become the victor in the perilous lives they lead, characters such as Paul Baümer and Gene Forrester try to maintain control over basic emotional judgments while “everything seems…confused and hopeless” (Remarque 87).
One of the most important things the characters in All Quiet on the Western Front and A Separate Peace are trying to control are their close friendships with the men they are surrounded by. In these friendships, the characters find solace for the emotional wounds afflicted on them by both direct and indirect tragedies of war. Wartime friendships are often different from those existing during times of peace; during a war, the only people left for a man to love are those around him. Paul realizes that “wartime friendships are like an intimacy between lovers” (Remarque 37), and Gene often looks to Finny with feelings that seem to be more than ordinary friendship. Gene constantly admires Finny, commenting on his athletic grace and fluid motions, depicting him “in exaltation, [with] body…in perfection…[he is] supreme fantasy” (Knowles 67). Gene seems unsure as to whether feelings such as these are just close friendship because “[Finny] was [Gene’s] best friend” (Knowles 40), or love. Gene realizes that “exposing a sincere emotion…life that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide” (Knowles 40), but Paul realizes his need for friendship and can express it more easily than Gene. Perhaps this is because the two characters have different relationships with the war itself, thus affecting the ways they treat their relationships with the people they are connected to. Both Paul and Gene’s best friends die during their wartime experiences, but the two characters clearly handle the deaths in different ways. While both characters find comfort in the close relationships they have with their friends, when Finny dies, Gene acts very differently than Paul does when Kat dies. When Finny dies, Gene seems to hardly care, as he “did not cry then or ever about Finny” (Knowles 186), but when his friend and mentor Kat dies, Paul’s life is destroyed: he “know[s] nothing more” (Remarque 291) and loses a cause for living. Paul dies soon after Kat does, and “seem[ed] rather glad the end had come” (Remarque 296), for he was liberated from the appalling bonds of war and brought closer once again to his friend. It is hard to find a balance for the depth of friendship when war wants to be your only friend, and Gene and Paul constantly realize the challenge of maintaining this balance for the ways they treat and respect their best friends.
During times of war, characters are often fraught with the difficult task of maintaining their sense of themselves. They find it hard to differentiate their own personality from that of which others want them to be, like Gene, who has trouble clarifying the line between what he wants himself to be and what Finny wants him to be. When he believes that Finny is jealous of him and wants to drag down his academic ability so that Finny can be the noted of the pair, Gene doesn’t seem to realize that Finny is merely trying to help him. He doesn’t realize that he is the one who wants to bring down Finny. Gene is “subject to the dictates of [his] own mind” (Knowles 26), so when he can’t accept that he was not at his own academic ideal, he blames it on Finny, saying, “Finny had deliberately set out to wreck my studies” (Knowles 45). Gene thinks his way out of feeling smothered by Finny’s athletic prowess is to excel academically. He doesn’t realize that his own way of standing out is to be sure of himself and confident in his own actions, because he is not being compared to Finny. It is each man for himself, much like it is for Paul in the army, when “[Earth is] his only friend” (Remarque 55), as each man is on his own, only fighting “to save [himself]” (Remarque 113). Paul also has a hard time upholding his sturdy sense of himself during war, but he has less trouble regulating the depth of his friendships with others than Gene does. Paul finds most of his problems with keeping his human values intact, commenting on the brutalities and treatment of humans like animals in war. In the poem “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” Wilfred Owen calls the soldiers in World War II “those who die[d] as cattle” (line 1), which is not the only time the soldiers are declared similar to animals. Paul also necessitates the need for an “animal instinct…to become…human animals” (Remarque 56) or “wild beasts” (Remarque 113) in order to survive the inconsistencies of wartime attacks from enemies. It is also necessary to learn how to be flexible with the amount of human attitude inserted into a soldier’s personality at any one time.
People who are living in the turbulence of wartime society often find themselves grappling to sustain a thorough mentality of a set enemy. Oftentimes, soldiers enlist in an army not knowing specifically who or what their enemy is. They only find out whom the enemy is by whom they are trying to avoid and kill in battles. For Paul, this is the case: he knows that his enemies are the French, because the flag carried by the men who attack him is that of France. However, he doesn’t seem to see French individuals as enemies. He doesn’t carry vast hatred for the men he aims his gun at when he truly doesn’t know them:
[The enemy] was only an idea to me before,
an abstraction that lived in my mind… it
was that abstraction I [killed]. But now, for the first time, I see [the
enemy] is a man
just like me…if we threw away these rifles and this uniform [the enemy]
could be my
brother just like Kat and Albert. (Remarque 223)
When Paul has to kill a French man in order to preserve his own life, he finally realizes that the enemy is only that because he believes they are, and that beyond their uniforms, they are men just like him with families and friends who cherish their lives just as much as those who love Paul cherish him. While Paul’s enemy is the French, Gene’s enemy for a time is Finny, who he believes is trying to bring him down. Gene soon comes to the realization that one’s only true enemy can be oneself; the only person who can stop someone from living his own life as he pleases and choosing the ease of the life they lead is oneself. Enemies are merely a figment of the imagination, something created to comfort the uneasiness of the irony of hating one’s own self.
Those living in times of war find the gentle and simplistic beauty of nature an amicable aid in maintaining control over the basic aspects of their everyday lives. While involved with a war, one sees so much ugliness and horror that he needs to find gentle comfort in the natural beauty of his surroundings. In the poem, “Spring Offensive,” Wilfred Owen writes, “halted against the shade of a last hill / [the soldiers] fed, and…were at ease” (lines 1-2). The soldiers tossed into the violence of war often find peace in the serenity of Mother Nature. “The Sun, like a friend” (line 24), “summer ooz[ing] into their bones like an injected drug for their pains” (lines 9-10), and the “cold gust, [which] tighten[ed every soldier] for battle” (lines 19-21) are only a few of the calming, preparatory influences that immersion in nature has on the young soldiers. Peace is a rare gem in times of war. The sharp contrast between the ugliness of war and the magnificent beauty of nature can cause the soldiers to thirst so hungrily for peace and their old lives that the sight of pure landscape can cause them to lose their principles and forget the consequences of their actions only to be united with their pasts. One soldier to whom this happened was Detering, whose mere “misfortune was that he saw a cherry tree in a garden” (Remarque 275) reminding him of his life before the war. The atrocities of war can be so greatly traumatizing that the simplicity of nature can cause a grown man like Detering to act as he did. Gene also finds consolation in the quiet beauty of the Devon School, where the “healthy green turf was brushed with dew…ahead [one could see] the twilight sun…the Academy [was]…the calmest, most caring…in the world” (Knowles 10). The splendor of nature relaxed the boys and brought peace to them in their troubled times. Nature constantly provides “momentary aberration” (Remarque 277) for those suffering from the pains of everyday life and the perils of war with calming scenes and the comfort of the continuation of nature’s beauty that never changes.
While it made sense to the soldiers at the time, perhaps future generations of soldiers to come will not understand the motivations of Paul and Gene, and others like them. “Men will not understand [the soldiers of World War I]” (Remarque 294), says Paul Baümer, reflecting on his wartime experience right before his death. Future generations will understand, however, the aspects of their lives that all people living in the midst of a war need to control: their friendships, their personal awareness, their fabricated enemies, and their respect for the beauty of nature. These entities are common human needs during so-called “normal” life. When war enters a society, all emotions and events are amplified without the subjects realizing it, so it is natural that the needs of a man are amplified as well. Every man had his own way of dealing with the war, from Paul, a soldier, to Gene, a teenaged schoolboy whose only disturbance by the war was the social pressure it caused. Some of those involved with the war survived and resolved their differences with themselves and their peers, and others were destroyed by the war, be it physically or emotionally. “It [was] the common fate of [that] generation” (Remarque 87) to be thrust into the awkward position of being “pitted violently against something in the world around them” (Knowles 194), be it oneself or an “enemy.” The only way to get through these troubled times was to find solace in maintaining control over friendships, one’s own self, the set enemy, and the beauty of nature.