I finished reading the book "No War on the West Front" online, and then I specially purchased the physical book. This is the second book, the first one is "Harry Potter".
I like to read some relaxed and pleasant books, which makes my life feel promising. Life is already very tense, why are you still unhappy? Right? But I often can't bear it for a long time and I will pick one or two books that don't look very "good" to read. The book "No War on the Western Front" was kept on the bookshelf of "WeChat Reading" for a long time until I started reading it.
This book was written in Germany. As the defeated party and initiator of war , the narrative about the war is particularly meaningful. This meaning does not refer to political aspects, but rather what the war initiated will bring to all ordinary soldiers and people under the warring countries.
As the author said: This book is neither accusation nor confession.
I just tried to describe a generation destroyed by war-
even if they avoided shells.
I have never liked war since I was a child, I don’t read, I don’t listen, and I don’t participate in any topics about war. It’s the same as when I was a child that I was most afraid of knowing that my parents would die in the end. I was instinctively afraid of these things.
I have never figured out one thing. I know no one is willing to die, and most people are definitely unwilling to rob things that do not belong to them through killing. So how did the war start? Why do some people say "I want to fight" and respond as much as possible, and then they can evolve into a war that swept the world?
At that time, no one was afraid of death and pain?
In ancient my country, nomadic peoples plundered the Central Plains due to the dilemma of eating short food and drinking less. The farming people fought back to plunder to protect their food. This is a struggle based on survival, similar to predation and arrest under nature. I do not agree, but it is probably understandable.
But there are some wars, and the reasons for inexplicable development are for religion, skin color, grand career, etc. Why are there people who follow one after another and die and bleed?
Why no one presses the pause key when an inexplicable war is brought up?
The protagonist of "No War on the West Front" is a high school student. He has a father who has been a sailor, a mother and two sisters who have sewed and earned money for others.
He has his own room, a bookshelf, a brown leather sofa, a desk and a spring bed, oh, he also has a piano. He likes reading books, trying to write poetry, and secretly longs for women.
He was originally one of the thousands of ordinary German boys.
Then the war begins.
The boys of seventeen or eighteen are always quite conceited before they go through things, believing that the world can operate according to their own wishes, but in fact, under their faces that despise adult rules, they are still immature souls, and they instinctively rely on authority, such as parents, teachers, and the country...
They don’t know how to think and don’t have time to form their own understanding.
And adults are stepping up their input to their empty heads.
Paul's physical education teacher was a war fanatic. He delivered speeches again and again to encourage and even coerced students to join the army until everyone in the class joined the army.
If they do not join the army, they may become scholars, writers, judges, accountants and other different professional individuals, but now they have a unified name - soldiers.
Soldiers are an existence with only collective will, instinctively obey explicit orders, strictly prohibited thinking, and very serious assimilation.
Paul and the others did not think that they would become soldiers in the future before becoming soldiers, and thinking became an extremely dangerous thing after becoming soldiers. If they were lucky enough to die after the war, the experience of soldiers would become a nightmare they would avoid.
It can be said that they do the job of soldiers, but they may not have seriously thought about their identity as a soldier from a true sense.
They don’t know why they are fighting, and they don’t know how to stop the war. They just keep killing and being killed. Everything from the moment they become soldiers is stopping their thoughts.
As ordinary people, we can be philosophical, thoughtful, polite, and love, but when you hold the gun in both hands, thoughts and civilization will be the shackles you shoot at the enemy's bullets.
Do you want to survive? Then discard your thoughts. The book
describes Paul and his wartime state as follows: When the first time he heard the grenade explode, part of our existence suddenly jumped up and went back thousands of years ago. This part is the animal instinct that awakens us. It guides us and protects us. It does not come from consciousness. It is faster, faster, safer and more reliable than consciousness. Unexplainable. When we set out, we were unhappy or excited soldiers - we came to the frontier border. We became human-shaped beasts.
As long as you experience war, you cannot remain rude and cruel. They have seen a living person whose head was blown off, a running soldier who was blown off his legs, holding the intestines that gusts out of his hands to the emergency station for help, and have also seen people without mouths, chins, and faces, who can be blown off by gunfire at any part of the body. What else can you ask for them? The stubborn and unwilling to become a person, probably the bones of the people who have been cold.
A normal society composed of morality, civilization and legal system has an instinctive fear of animal nature, because animal nature often represents cold-blooded, cruel, and anti-social tendencies. Through book education, shackles and prisons, human beings have wrapped a veil of warmth on human nature layer by layer, such as love, kindness, selflessness, poetry and painting, and other poetic feelings.
It is ironic that under terrible natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, the warm shadow under this education can still be seen. Many people are willing to risk their lives to help others and bring out the greatness of goodness in disasters.
In wars that can be created by humans, the destruction of this civilization is simply easy. At least the soldiers can easily understand this. When struggling to survive, the beastly nature lurks in their bodies is more effective than being humans.
Paul is a boy, but when he was a soldier, he often didn't realize this. Age is something that only human society can understand, but it won't be in the world of wild beasts.
The education he received in school in the first ten years and the influence he was in society as a human being, were destroyed like a destruction and destruction by the wounds, gas bombs, tanks, and field hospitals.
He survived on the battlefield with beast nature. When he went home to visit his relatives for the first time, he felt that loneliness. No one understood him, and he could no longer understand normal people. When he went to visit Kerrysey's mother, the article described it like this: "I sympathize with her and think she is a little stupid. She should be open-minded. Whether she knows it or not, Kerrysey is dead. A person who is used to death can no longer understand why there will be such great pain just because one person dies."
So when he returned to the army, he was even delighted, with his companions there, and he was no longer alone.
Paul refused to think, he knew that thinking was sometimes more deadly than shells. If Carter does not die, he may have lived through the final war, but if Carter dies, the battlefield is his best destination unless he can tolerate wandering alone as a beast in human society. People may be able to endure pain, but they cannot endure eternal loneliness.
So at the end of the article he died:
"He died in October 1918. That day, the whole front line was silent. The record in the military command headquarters' battle report was only one sentence: There was no war on the Western Front.
He fell forward, as if he was lying on the ground and asleep. If he turned him over, he would see that he had not suffered too long-term pain - his face was calm, just as he was satisfied with the ending like this."
Paul was obviously disgusted with war, and at least he began to refuse from the moment he joined the war. But he still chose to pick up the guns and even be called brave. The personal will has little influence from the moment the war sounds, and even plays a role in fueling the fire.
War is not a beautiful thing, it is something everyone knows. But it always comes to the human world in a few years.
"I think it's more like a fever.""Crop said, "No one likes war." But it suddenly came. We don’t want war, and others don’t want it—but now, half of the world has joined the war. "
A command can turn these silent figures into our enemies or our friends. The nations are forced to be enemies, and the people are silent, ignorant, stupid, obedient, and kill each other innocently.
War is always determined by a few people, and more people blindly follow. The old saying goes, the masses have a sharp vision, but it is not.
If there is only one person, he will be able to look forward and be cautious, Be cautious. Even if this reason cannot help him see the essence of things clearly, it is very likely to prevent the mistake of being arrogant and arrogant.
But if it is an individual in the group, it is mostly stupid, weak, and very conceited. The group will always convey a wrong perception to people, thinking that "we" is very powerful.
"we" may be strong or not, but it is very certain that "we" is composed of individual individuals Yes, only half of the probability of misfortune falling on "we", but it will fall on a certain individual 100%.
When one of the individuals encounter misfortune, he will find that the strength given to the individual by the group is false, fragile, vulnerable, and even divided. You can clearly feel the joys, sorrows and sorrows of this group, but the group has a deep barrier from you, and he cannot empathize with you , and you are even meaningless to him!
When you find that your misfortune is the honor of the group, and even if it is not understood, you will only be weak and painful. After the pain, you will wake up and then feel disheartened.
There is a passage from Paul in the book:
He is right. We are no longer young. We no longer want to conquer the world. We are deserters. We both escape ourselves and life. We are only eighteen years old. We are just beginning to love the world and love life, but we don’t We have to fire all this. The first grenade, the first attack, shot at our heart. We have cut off from action, pursuit and progress. We no longer believe in all this: we only believe in war.
We have long since stopped thinking about so much. It is too unrealistic to think about too much. For us, only the actual is correct and important, and there are too few good boots.
When narrating the cold, fierce and desperate battlefield, many bright colors are often inserted into large sections.
For example: Skylark that fly up every morning on the position.
Outside the barbed wire of the prisoner-of-war camp, every night, the wind blows from the direction of the birch forest. The sky is full of stars.
After a war, the soldiers' delicious food, fiery poppy, cigarettes and summer wind.
Between the fire, the trees shine with colorful golden light. The berries of the Yamana tree hang red among the leaves.
The author's writing is as broad and stable as the war is. When I first read it, I always feel that it is a bit cruel to put such a beautiful scenery into the purgatory of the earth. How can people with blood be faced with the blooming daffodils in the wilderness, and the lily in the valley? That is another mental illness after the body is severely damaged. The abuse that he was not given. When he rereaded, he burst into tears and was full of expectations.
In fact, the mountains and rivers outside guns, grenades, blood, death will never change, the plants and trees will always be lush, and the smoke will still be filled with birds breaking their shells and making the first clear sound, becoming only human.
I only wish the mountains and rivers are safe, the world is awake, and the war will stop forever.
