All quiet on the Western Front and Pearse's "The Mother"

The Mother

by Padraic Pearse

I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge

My two strong sons that I have seen go out

To break their strength and die, they and a few,

In bloody protest for a glorious thing,

They shall be spoken of among their people,

The generations shall remember them,

And call them blessed;

But I will speak their names to my own heart

In the long nights;

The little names that were familiar once

Round my dead hearth.

Lord, thou art hard on mothers:

We suffer in their coming and their going;

And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary

Of the long sorrow---And yet I have my joy:

My sons were faithful, and they fought. (1)

As you can see from the text of the poem above, The Mother is a poem of a mother's suffering and PRIDE of the sons she's lost to war. She understands their sacrifice and laments their deaths; she does not begrudge them their deaths although it's caused her sorrow.......... but she finds joy in the fact that they were faithful to their country and fought for themselves, for her, and for their countrymen.

The Mother can be seen in direct contrast to All Quiet on the Western Front, where we find the main theme is the brutality of war; there is no romanticism in this novel, no pride of country, no glory, no sense of honor, and no embrasure of a person's sense of duty to their country. All Quiet on the Western Front replaces the romanticism and heroism with a decidedly unromantic vision of fear, meaninglessness, and butchery.

Part of the reason for this is the war itself. WWI boasted the advent of new technology in war. Killing became impersonal and mechanical because of war's new tools. WWI brought in a new type of war........... and All Quiet on the Western Front unveiled a new perspective on war's atrocities.

None-the-less, to any mother in any war, the loss of a child is personal. Even in the face of believing a war to be senseless........... a mother sees and feels the loss........... she's lost her child to duty............ whether that duty was volunteered or enforced makes no matter. Her child has served, and in the end his/her loss will never be seen in any other way.......... how else could she feel?