John C. Wright asks us to perform a thought-experiment in literary criticism:
Suppose you read a book or saw a film about a firefighting brigade. Let us say there are five main characters, all firemen, who are wakened one night by alarm bells. Donning their gear and sliding down their brass poles to their firetruck, they race, sirens wailing and running red-lights, to the scene of a house ablaze. Red tongues of fire lick at the dark sky, and black plumes and smoke rise up like malignant genii.
In this story, the first fireman is accidentally killed by falling down the brass fire-pole, and the second is flung from the speeding firetruck when it takes a corner too sharply; the third dies when a blast from the hose knocks him from a tall ladder into the coal cellar where all the coal is burning; the fourth is overcome by smoke inhalation because he did not fasten his breathing gear properly; and the fifth is racing up the burning staircase when he sees a wee little butterfly trapped in the stairwell. The butterfly reminds him of his childhood. As he reaches for it, the stairs collapse under him, while the firehose, somehow contrives to loop itself around his neck and the chandelier, breaks his neck, and the flood of water to the hose makes his corpse spin around the chandelier like a grotesque puppet.
Now imagine furthermore, that, in this story, there is no mention (except in ironic mockery) of the people trapped in the burning house the firemen are there to rescue, no mention (except in ironic mockery) of any previous time the fire brigade had saved lives or put out fires, no mention (except in ironic mockery) by any character of the possibility of the fire spreading.
In other words, imagine a story about a fire brigade where the purpose of manning a fire brigade somehow escapes mention.
I’m beginning to wonder if he’s even talking about fire brigades…
The whole entire point of All Quiet on the Western Front is precisely what he’s complaining about: that the situation was so unsuited for human existence that it was not possible for the firemen to come to grips with the fire. There was a total disconnect, repeatedly reinforced and worsened by bad leadership. That’s why that book got written. That’s what makes it a great book.
Yes, the Bush-Obama era anti-war movies are clumsy attempts to take up the same theme that don’t work because they’re trying to apply lessons drawn from WWI-horror to radically different situations with no regard for the facts of either set of situations. That’s simply dishonesty; it doesn’t invalidate the underlying concept they’re trying to exploit.
The existence of heroism at Verdun does not change the fact that, for the men who lived through it, the thing called “war” had to be avoided at absolutely and literally any cost, to the point that twenty years later they were terrified and horrified at the mere suggestion. How and why that opinion gets formed — especially among the people who supposedly won — is absolutely a story worth telling, and the lesson being communicated is one worth learning, regardless of how the dishonest may attempt to twist it to serve their own ambitions.
Or Free Northerner’s Colour Doesn’t Exist