“Austria’s act is a crime,” says the Austrian.
“France must win,” says the Englishman.
“I hope Germany will be beaten,” says the German.
The novel is for the most part a first-person account of uncompromising realism. It begins, however, far from the conventions of realistic fiction while retaining the thematic construction of looking at war through the cold, dead eyes of truthful reckoning. The opening chapter almost verges on pure fantasy as the architects of war who may countries their home but are no nationalists defy the expectations of their traditional perspectives. The Austrian’s reckoning of war crimes, the Briton expressing the purest of betrayal and the German admitting that the world is always the better when Germany is defeated are expressing viewpoints about war from a higher degree than mere allegiance to happenstance of geography. They are the architects of war for whom victory is expressed not collectively, but personally. It is important who wins or loses as long the circumstances at the end set the groundwork for another war a little later on.
Suddenly a fearful explosion falls on us. I tremble to my skull; a metallic reverberation fills my head; a scorching and suffocating smell of sulphur pierces my nostrils. The earth has opened in front of me. I feel myself lifted and hurled aside— doubled up, choked, and half blinded by this lightning and thunder. But still my recollection is clear; and in that moment when I looked wildly and desperately for my comrade-in-arms, I saw his body go up, erect and black, both his arms out- stretched to their limit, and a flame in the place of his head!
The bulk of the narrative exists a long way from its ethereal opening. The fantasy world in that first chapter soon enough gives way to excruciating horrors of war in all their flesh-and-bone reality. One common criticism of the novel, in fact, is that the descriptive passages from the battlefield are plentiful and filled with such explicit imagery of unromanticized warriors working overtime to shred other living creatures into barely recognizable examples of humanity that the ultimate effect threatens to become one of desensitizing readers rather than the obviously opposite intent.
“Two armies fighting each other—that’s like one great army committing suicide!”
The novel is a gloriously and vehemently an anti-war statement. Heroism is demonstrated as a consequence of war, but never demonstrated to be logically connected. In fact, each page becomes another nail in the coffin of almost every possible justification for war as a logical outcome of any circumstance. The quote here summarizes the author’s fundamental perception of the logic of war. No matter the reasons that two countries decide to go to war against each other, the ultimate casualty of engagement is not the issues of contention but the men turned into soldiers to becomes slaves to the architects designing the issues for the purpose of pushing the countries into war.
