All Quiet?

Reading the classic war novel All Quiet on the Western Front, I'm particularly struck by the author's discussion of the noise of the front and how it permeates his existence so completely that he no longer feels he has any access to treasured quiet moments from his past. Tied in with that--he feels a painful dissociation from his whole family, including his mother, ill with cancer, who cannot understand his life on the battlefield. They obviously feel an enormous love for each other, and he longs to return to the quiet days of his past--but the agony of life at the front has subsumed everything else.

The novel truly lives up to its billing as one of the greatest anti-war novels of all time. (By the way, I'm not reading this as part of a "disaster novel reading marathon," despite appearances; it just happens to be one of those classic works of literature that I feel embarrassed not to have read yet.) How do I react to it as a mother? I can imagine this mother, slaving away at a hot stove to provide her son with potato cakes, one of his favorite treats, when he comes home on leave; or scrimping and saving for weeks to buy wool underwear for him. I can imagine it but I know how far I am from having experienced it. And I also know how far I am from having my son wrenched from his familiar surroundings and thrust into a hellish environment where the very earth is heaving up around him, ripping his friends to shreds.

We're at war, in at least two regions of the world. How detached we are, most of us Americans, from all that. Reading this novel, I have to wonder, as naive as it sounds, how anyone can stand to make anyone else go to war. There's something that we all should be doing in response to Afghanistan and Iraq, and I don't mean marching in the streets. Something we need to do, to feel more in touch with what's happening. I don't pretend to know exactly what that is; but reading this novel makes this need feel much more urgent, somehow.