“Nothing will end war unless the peoples themselves refuse to go to war.” ~ Albert Einstein
The war to end war
In All Quiet on the Western Front, author Erich Maria Remarque presents war as a spiritual and physical hell — a triumph of duplicitous abstractions. In memoir-like fashion Paul Baumer tells how he and his German classmates signed up for the Great War after hearing patriotic speeches at school. But the horror of trench warfare and living conditions soon changed them. “We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.”.....
When [Christmas Eve] came, opposing troops . . . called to each other from trench to trench and sang. A French soldier wrote to his mother that after they first met with the enemy, they chorused, each in his own language, “À bas la guerre!”—Down with the war!
A more stunning example of gross insubordination would be hard to find.
For one brief moment in 1914, the soldiers stopped seeing uniforms and began seeing faces again. If only they had managed to keep up their mutinous spirit until the war was aborted, we would have had every reason to thank them for their service each and every year.
