Chapters 9-12. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This reading is so dense with so many topics; the fight with Gerard Duval in the shell crater, line leadership, the description of life and death in a field hospital, what men hope for \u201cafter\u201d the war\u2026. But I want to examine two things: the writing about food in chapter 10 and then in chapter 11 the summer of 1918 and how B\u00e4umer and his fellow soldiers desperately cling to the hope of making it out alive as it appears the war is winding down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Food! B\u00e4umer and his comrades have been given the duty of guarding a supply depot in a small French village that still has some inhabitants in it. The deport is behind the front lines and the unit hopes for some relief from the constant bombardments and attacks of the trench line. In the village they find everything they missed; the find actual bed mattresses with clean blankets, fireplaces that still work and chopped wood ready to hand. The French do not bomb villages that still have civilians in it so there is relief from artillery attacks. But most of all, there is food! lots of food, and real coffee, and cigars, wine, vegetables to be scavenged, potatoes to be made into pancakes and still-functioning kitchens in which to prepare the food as B\u00e4umer says \u201ca regular cook\u2019s paradise\u201d. It is \u201ca grand feed\u201d as Kat remarks looking at several suckling pigs. Four pages are dedicated to the food and the enjoyment of this unexpected and wonderful windfall of duty behind the front lines. For a few days, B\u00e4umer and his fellow soldiers almost feel like human beings again, instead of the half-starved killing machines they had to become to survive in the trenches. Reading this, I almost felt guilty of having a big lunch. Food \u2013 so elemental to human life has a taste for B\u00e4umer and his comrades that we cannot imagine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The desperate hope to survive the war. By the summer of 1918. B\u00e4umer has been fighting along the front lines for almost three years. He is no longer the young man who enlisted in the Army at the urgings of his parents and School Master to do his patriotic duty. He is a man who has seen horror that has scared his psyche so deeply he doubts his ability to \u201creturn\u201d to normal life. He is not alone in this sentiment. Long time comrades have been dying with regularity in the summer of 1918, the most brutal part of the war. The Allied forces facing B\u00e4umer\u2019s unit are better fed, better equipped, and are \u201cfresher\u201d troops with the introduction of American and Colonial forces. New technologies such as the tank and advanced aircraft have outstripped the German forces where the ratio is about 5 to 1. But B\u00e4umer knows that he and his German comrades are tougher, more experienced and as they read the dispatches, it appears that mounting an offensive will be next-to-never given the dearth of manpower and ammunition for the German Army. Hope \u2013 that dangerous emotion warned against in earlier chapters begins to creep into the discussions of the soldiers. There is a line at the end of chapter 11, \u201cthe breath of hope sweeps over the scorched fields, raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonizing terror of death, an insensate question: Why? Why do they not make an end\u201d? B\u00e4umer and his fellow soldiers begin to think they may make it out of war alive. Knowing the fate of B\u00e4umer, of Kat, of those men the reader has come to know intimately, understanding what fate has in store for them just breaks your heart. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chapters 9-12. This reading is so dense with so many topics; the fight with Gerard Duval in the shell crater, line leadership, the description of life and death in a field hospital, what men hope for \u201cafter\u201d the war\u2026. But … Continue reading