Taki Taki

Soldiering is for others

Broadsides from the pirate captain of the Jet Set

issue 30 August 2003

Gstaad

All Quiet on the Western Front was written in 1929 and became an instant best-seller; in Germany alone more than 3 million copies were sold within 18 months. Hollywood made a film of it the following year and it won an Oscar for Best Picture. I read it during the closing days of the second world war, my great uncle, a German scholar, helping me along. I saw the film in 1949 and never forgot the haunting scene when the hero, Paul Baumer, kills a Frenchman who had randomly jumped into his foxhole in no-man’s-land. Baumer bayonets him in the throat, after which he watches the man die slowly, gurgling blood. Overcome by guilt, the German comforts the Frenchman and, after the latter’s death, he finds photographs of his loved ones tucked inside his uniform. In other words, the enemy is just like us.

Don McCullin echoed the haunting scenario when he photographed a dead Viet Cong soldier in Hue in 1968, his plundered belongings lying beside him, a picture of his pretty sweetheart facing his dead eyes.

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