“The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”, Essay Example

There are several things that unite The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier by Jacob Walter and All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. First of all it is that both books were written from the viewpoint of a common soldier. In the Remarque’s book it is 19-year old Paul Bäumer who is the narrator of the story and who represents Remarque’s own experience, and in The Diary… it is Walter himself.  As common soldiers Paul and Walter couldn’t see the whole picture of the wars and so they depicted only those campaigns or battles in which they were directly involved. Therefore both books present somewhat a limited view of the scopes of the WWI and the Russian Campaign of Napoleon.

The main difference between Jacob Walter and Paul Bäumer is that Paul had enlisted in the army himself, it was the expression of his patriotism and true believe in what his country was doing. On the contrast Walter was a conscript, in addition he was German not French and so he wasn’t able to share the patriotism of fellow French soldiers and their love and devotion to Napoleon, that’s why Jacob wasn’t truly loyal to Bonaparte. I think that in some way for Jacob it was easier to overcome all the difficulties and horrors of the war than for Paul. The reason for this is that Paul had a lot of friends who were fighting together with him and who were dying one after another. Each time someone of his friends died Paul was also dying mentally. After Stanislaus Katczinsky’s death Bäumer became careless of what will happen with him next – “Let the months and the years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more”. At the same time Walter hated his French allies and so he didn’t really care of whether they were alive or killed.

From the very beginning Jacob knew that the war is a totally useless thing and his only strive was the desire to come back home and to join his family. On the contrast Paul did realize how stupid and brutal the war was only after ten weeks of camp training. The disappointment that Bäumer and his school friends experienced was really painful and bitter. All their ideals were ruined by the reality of the war. They were too young for their values to be formed before the war had started and so the process of their inner growth and development occurred during the war and their personalities were greatly influenced by what they were seeing on the battlefield. Eventually Paul came to the bitter understanding that the drives that motivated him to enlist into the army – the ideas of patriotism and nationalism – were meaningless words and empty clichés. Another distinction between Jacob and Paul is that Walter knew what he was going to do after the war was finished. He had no interest in the military campaigns and all his thoughts were focused on returning back home. At the same time, although realizing how stupid the war was, Paul had no idea what he would do after it was finished, the only thing which he knew how to perform was fighting.

Both books give good depictions of how people turn into animals during the war. In All Quiet on the Western Front one of the bloodiest events is the battle of Paul and his comrades with a charging group of Allied infantrymen. During this battle Paul realized that in order to survive he had to forget about his human side and to trust only his own instincts. One of the most horrible events described in The Dairy of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier is the battle on the city of Smolensk – “Everyone fired and struck at the enemy in wild madness, and no one could tell whether he was in front, in the middle, or behind the center of the army”. After reading these two books you realize how difficult it is to stay emotionally stable after all the events and battles. The scene that shocked me the most in The Diary… is the one when men began to eat horses’ meat because they had no other food, how they fought over this meat, and how Jacob was forced to boil and eat the blood of horses.

Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front shows perfectly how meaningless and absurd the WWI in particular and all other wars in general were. The main tragedy was that people who had no grudge against each other were forced to kill one another and to become enemies. After killing Duval Paul once again understood that this man wasn’t his enemy, he was simply the same victim of the war as Paul himself was. In his book Remarque portrait all the physical and psychological aspects of the war – constant physical danger, unceasing attack on nerves, appalling conditions in which soldiers were forced to live, and a simple instinctive fear of death. The theme of hypocrisy is also present in the book. The society was demanding everyone to enlist into the army, those who refused were seen as enemies of the nation. But very often those who demanded young guys to go and fight in the war didn’t join the army themselves. In All Quiet on the Western Front the representative of such hypocrites is Paul’s schoolmaster Kantorek who urged his pupils – Baumer, Kropp, Leer, Muller, Behm and others – to fight in the name of patriotism while not volunteering himself.

It seems to me that the reason why The Diary of Napoleonic Foot Soldier by Jacob Walter is included into the course of Western Civilization is that it is the only record of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign shown from the perspective of a common soldier. It gives us almost a perfect vision and understanding of how people felt at that time and what they were thinking during the battles and their service in the army.  The same idea can be applied to All Quiet on the Western Front. The First World War of something like a turn point in the military service and it absolutely changed the mankind’s conception of the war. Although technological advances that were invented and used during the WWI made it easier and less personal to kill, Remarque showed all the psychological horrors that one still experienced while killing others.

I was absolutely shocked by some of the moments and scenes in both books, after reading them I once again came to the conclusion that any war is a totally meaningless thing, that it ruins the psychology of people who fight in it and that it brings nothing but destruction.