All Quiet On The Western Front And The Man He Killed Analysis

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy both tell the story of men who are ravaged by a war and are forced into situations that lead them to have to choose between their own lives or the lives of others. While these two men’s stories take place in different countries at different times, they both go through the struggle of the universal soldier. The men were not naturally inclined to kill and both reflected after they killed another man that they could have been friends with that man and felt no true animosity towards their supposed enemy. The Man He Killed and All Quiet On The Western Front may take place in different time frames, but both ponder the same question: who is the enemy?

Paul

and the narrator in The Man He Killed may be a part of different armies yet they both face the struggle of the universal soldier. To understand how both Paul and the narrator face the struggle of the universal soldier it is necessary to first understand who the universal soldier is. The song “Universal Soldier” by Donovan displays the who the Universal soldier is quite clearly. The Universal soldier is of every race, every religion, every age, and every culture. The Universal soldier knows not to kill and still does for reasons he or she does not know. The Universal soldier sees that their actions are not helping anyone and is only causing more pain and yet the Universal soldier, “never sees the writing on the wall” (Buffy Sainte-Marie). The writing on the wall refers to a biblical story in which a king , Belshazzar, was warned that the days of his reign were numbered because of his disrespect towards god and his lack of humility ("BibleGateway."). This warning was given to Belshazzar and it was shown to him obviously that if he continued to disrespect god and lack in humility he would be killed and only suffering would come of it. Just like Belshazzar the Universal soldier is clearly able to see that his enemy is not really the common man in front of him and yet he chooses to ignore the obvious and continue making the same mistakes and stay in the same predicament. Paul and the narrator both begin to see the “writing on the wall” as the narrator realizes that in war “you shoot a fellow down You’d treat if met where any bar is” and Paul realizes that it is “merely the rulers” who cause the wars to begin(Hobbes) (Remarque 205). Yet both the narrator are faced with the common plight of the universal soldier, who is the enemy, the person that is trying to kill you, or the person who orders your death?
In both All Quiet On The Western Front and The Man He Killed a supposed foe is killed by each story’s main character.

Yet in neither case did they kill their foe because they felt a personal hatred for this enemy. Both Paul and the narrator killed because they were ordered to kill and because they had no other choice if they wanted to survive. The narrator of The Man He Killed when faced with an enemy “shot at him as he at me, and killed him in his place” (Hobbes). The narrator understood that the man he killed was his supposed enemy and yet he still thought that in another situation the “enemy” was somebody he would “treat, if met where any bar is” (Hobbes). In All Quiet On The Western Front Paul shares a similar view to the narrator of The Man He Killed. When coming upon an “enemy” Paul “[strikes] madly at home” killing the man but upon further reflection Paul begins to feel guilty for his actions (Remarque 216). Paul realizes that he had no personal grudge with this man and was forced to kill him to save himself. Both Paul and the narrator are aware that the men they killed were not the enemy, but only Paul was able to discover who was the actual enemy while the narrator accepted his situation without thinking. Paul begins to look at the bigger picture and realizes that “perhaps if twenty or thirty people in the world had said No” he would have nobody to fight and he would have no need to kill (Remarque 203). Both Paul and the narrator understand that those fighting them

are not truly the enemy even if they are labeled as such.
As All Quiet On The Western Front and The Man He Killed progress it progressively becomes more clear that Paul and the narrator have begun to grasp the idea that the men they are actually fighting are not the true enemy and are human just like them.

In All Quiet On The Western Front the main character, Paul, begins to view the men he is fighting as more than just animals. In chapter eight Paul is at a camp in which former Russian soldiers are held prisoner. The Russian prisoners are given very little to eat and very little supplies or items at all needed to survive and in this image of misery Paul finally begins to see these men as people. Paul realizes that “ a word of command has made these men [his] enemies” and even more importantly that a “word of command might transform them into [his] friends” (Remarque 193-194). At this moment Paul realized that the men that he was fighting were more than his enemy and were also people. Even more importantly Paul realized that the men he was supposed to be fighting were not the actual enemy and were only the enemy because of a person's command. The narrator of The Man He Killed appears to grasp the idea that the enemy is human at the beginning of the poem as he says that if he and the enemy had met at an ancient inn they would have sat down to “wet right many a nipperkin” (Hardy). As both Paul and the narrator begin to view the people they are fighting as human their image of who the enemy is slowly fades away as both men realize

that the enemy is not the people they are fighting but those giving them orders.
The Man He Killed and All Quiet On The Western Front took place in different time frames, but both ponder the same question: who is the enemy? Both Paul and the narrator went through the struggle of the universal soldier and were forced to understand that it was merely the rulers of people who wanted them killed not the people they were directly fighting. Paul and the narrator also had to go through the struggle of killing an enemy soldier but both discovered that they had no personal anger at the men they killed but instead killed only to preserve their own lives. This caused both men to start to see that the common soldier was not the real enemy they were facing. Finally by humanizing the enemy Paul and the narrator were able to accept that the enemy they were facing was in a situation very similar to them and helped to further solidify the idea that the common soldier was not the true enemy they were facing. Through the struggle of the universal soldier, the pain of killing an enemy, and the humanization of the enemy Paul and the narrator questioned who was truly their enemy.