I was always embarrassed by the words 'sacred', 'glorious', and 'sacrifice' and the expression 'in vain'. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

(from A Farewell To Arms, by Ernest Hemingway)  




   

    Paul (Lew Ayres) with a dying French soldier he has stabbed (All Quiet on the Western Front) 


The shot above is from a movie version of All Quiet On The Western Front released in 1930. The movie was updated with Richard Thomas as Paul and Ernest Borgnine as Katczinski in 1979. 



                       

                                                            Richard Thomas in the 1970's 


The story is about to be updated again by director Roger Donaldson, with Travis Fimmel starring. Release is set for 2017. I will be interested to see what they do with that trench scene. It has had a lifelong effect on me. I first read the book in my 20's, then taught it, then watched both film versions of it, the Richard Thomas one at least 10 times. 


                                       

                                                                              Travis Fimmel in Warcraft 


In the aforementioned scene, Paul, a 19 year old German soldier in World War I, loses his way in the dark as he is trying to crawl back to his own lines after some chaotic fighting. He and his friends have been fighting the French, attacking and counter-attacking for months. As he crawls, he hears the voices of some French soldiers so he slips into a shell hole and stays totally silent. But by bad luck, a shell hits nearby and one of the Frenchmen jumps into the shell hole for cover as his comrades run away or jump into other shell holes. 

Paul has no choice. He has a dagger in a sheath in his boot so he grabs the Frenchman from behind and stabs him. Then he lets the body slip down a bit in the mud and tries to stay silent again. No one else comes into Paul's shell hole, but after a few minutes, he hears some rasping and groaning and he realizes that the Frenchman is not dead. He moves in cautiously to finish the man off, but he just can't do it. It is the first time Paul has had to look, up close, at the horrors that he does as a soldier. 

The man's wound is high up in the chest. Probably, only the top of the left lung has been cut. The man is helpless; his lungs are filling up with blood. Paul gives in and puts a clean dressing on the wound. The Frenchman hangs on through the night into the next day before he finally dies in Paul's arms. 

During that time, Paul makes the mistake of looking in the man's wallet and thus, soldiering finally becomes personal. In a monologue to the dying man, Paul tells him what he is now realizing: soldiers, tragically, never figure out until too late that they are the same underneath. They have moms who worry. They feel the warmth of the sun, bitch about bad food, try not to think about the horrors they have done. Paul knows now: he and this Frenchman could have been friends. They could have been brothers. 


I wonder almost every day about other smart people in the world. Do they see what a WWIII would be? Do they fear it? 

Anyway, I believe I have seen the root cause of this madness: we humans came to cultural variation millennia ago as our means of substituting meme-driven evolution for the gene-driven kind, and then, as a consequence, the device we have slipped into to keep our species vigorous. 

War. 

The thing that I believe scares us all - or at least all informed, experienced adults - is that we know deep down, we have to find a way to re-write this part of our programming. We can't do the all-out war madness anymore. 

Educate the people, and especially the kids, about the core values that we share. Courage. Love. Compassion. Hard work. Like Paul. Hemingway. Remarque. 

Men learning to love each other is the one good thing that comes out of war. First, buddies, and in the end, even the "enemy". But maybe, just maybe, instead of being so scared all of the time of being called "fags", we men are finally ready to learn this lesson without having to fight in wars. To love one another simply because the huge majority of us are worth it.  

We have a chance, a slim one but still, a chance, at a way out of this programmed Armageddon that we face. 

Love your neighbor. Then the rest will come.