Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [40]
Eric was a talented draftsman. In fact, his arrival knocked me from my position in the class as “best draw’er.” I clearly remember looking at his stuff and feeling a seeping twinge of envy, but also thinking, Wow, he’s better than me. Our works were sweeping panoramics in which the skies were clogged with ball-turreted B-29s, Luftwaffe dive-bombers (the Stuka was a favorite—we loved the aggressive geometry of the inverted gull wings, plus we thought it funny that a warplane might be branded a “Junkers”), P-51 Mustangs (consistently sporting shark teeth), and P-38 Lightnings. We scrambled a lot of those P-38s strictly because we fancied the exotic twin-booms look. On the ground, Panzers squared off with Shermans, and the guys in green sniped, machine-gunned, and lobbed grenades at guys in gray or black. We perfected our rendering of the German helmet with its visor and dropped rim (we secretly found it sharper-looking than the standard American GI soup pot) and carefully labeled every piece of enemy equipment with a swastika—an emblem we memorized with creepy assiduousness so as not to have the arms bent in the wrong direction. Every visible muzzle—on the planes, on the tanks, at the end of each rifle—spouted jagged flame. On an optimistic note, if a plane was smoking toward the earth, its pilot would be visible in the sky, parachuting safely to the ground. Perhaps an accidental archivist will one day prove me wrong, but as I recall there were few if any dead soldiers, and none of them wore green. War poured from our colored pencils not as hell, but as a circus plus fireworks where at worst the good guys suffered nonterminal flesh wounds. It was in this mind-set that I first read All Quiet on the Western Front. I still have the actual book. It’s a 1930 hardcover edition and the gray fabric is splotched with some unidentifiable spill. From the first page, I cherished the characters. I loved the rough Tjaden and his lice-popping oven. I hated Himmelstoss. I couldn’t wait to see what the witty scavenger, Kat, scrounged next. But I especially cared for the narrator, Paul Baumer. He seemed calm, thoughtful, and strong. I read him as just another steady Louis L’Amour cowboy. Then I got to chapter 9, and Paul stabbed an enemy soldier to death. He said the soldier was French. This did not compute. I backed up and reread the passage. From reading all those air ace books I knew the French were on our side. And were thus the good guys. But I had been operating under the assumption that the narrator was the good guy. He seemed like the good guy. He was a good guy. I puzzled over the section, rereading it several times to see if I had missed something in the chronology. And then it slowly dawned on me. Paul Baumer was one of the bad guys.
From an adult standpoint, my misread seems ludicrous. After all, three paragraphs into the book Baumer speaks of the “English heavies” hitting his company with high explosives; there are all the German names and surnames; and there are battle scenes with the French earlier in the book. I remember some of this niggling me at the time, but I was reading full speed ahead and pushed it aside, figuring I had missed some twist of history. But when I got to the scene in the shell hole, I could no longer get around it: Paul Baumer was a German soldier. He had killed one of the good guys. What did that make Baumer?
I don’t keep a chart or anything, but to the best of my recollection I have read All Quiet on the Western Front seven times. As a boy raised on Bible passages, I can’t say that it is the most important book in my life. But the impact of Paul Baumer’s story was profound, if subtle. When I opened the book, I possessed the vocabulary necessary to read the book, but until that section in