Dear Friends, Er war im Oktober 1918 gefallen, auf einen Tag,

for Erich Maria Remarque

an dem es auf der ganzen Front so still war, dass der Bericht nur schrieb: Im Westen nichts Neues. “He fell in October 1918 on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”

                                                           nichts Neues

                                                             nothing new

after all the deaths of his comrades, yes, nothing new in Paul Bäumer’s. Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929), intensified the pacifism of my parents’ generation already awakened by the British war poets and their explanation for the absence of what almost seemed like an entire generation of young men, the young men who might have been their fathers.

That final sentence, so quiet, has always, whenever I think of it, whenever I read it again, taken me … well where has it taken me? His death, and the official report. October 1918, the Armistice only weeks away – Wilfred Owen died a week before the Armistice. Futility.

                                    —O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

                                    To break earth’s sleep at all.

Futility. All those deaths so close to the end … but no, they are not worse, they only cry out to us the stupidity, the futility of all the others. No possible casus belli justifies the death of even one from first to last.

Owen wrote the sketch of an introduction for his poems before he died:

“Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.

The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

All the poet can do to-day is to warn.”                                                                 

And here we are today. Owen and Remarque, so many others, still stand before us, saying to us today the words of 1918, urgent as ever. Speaking to us, warning us.                                                                                                                                                                                

Love and solidarity,

Bobby