Quiet on the Eastern Front

A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE (378 pp.)--Erich Maria Remarque--Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).

Off the printed page, Erich Maria Remarque is a connoisseur of the good things in life--art, music, brandy. In his books, he is a collector of the evil things of his time--war, homelessness. futility. But his taste as a collector is rarely original, and perhaps too sentimental. When he was 18, he marched off to war with the Kaiser's armies; the result (not published until 1929) was All Quiet on the Western Front, still the best item in his collection. More recent history has given Remarque the plots for mediocre stories on a Nazi concentration camp (Spark of Life) and that victim of Europe's ravening isms, the rootless refugee (Arch of Triumph). Almost inevitably, Remarque had to write his novel of World War II. A June Book-of-the-Month-Club choice, A Time to Love and a Time to Die is a kind of pale tenth carbon copy of All Quiet with one difference:though it shows no less hate of war, it betrays much more love of life.

The change is perhaps due to the aging of the writer (he is a mellow 55), perhaps to the aging of the age. All Quiet was dedicated to a simple proposition: war is hateful, and the best way to prevent it is to hate it enough. It glowed with a kind of sentimentality in reverse. A quarter century later, that stalwart faith has come to seem as old-fashioned and disappointing as the generation that held it.

Layer Cakes. Ernst Graeber is a simple German foot soldier with both hands in the crumbling dike of the Eastern Front in the spring of 1944. For Graeber and his comrades, hell is not only the Russians but the stacks of German corpses emerging like an obscene layer cake from the melting snows, January casualties on top, October casualties on the bottom. When the Russians begin hitting his sector of the front with heavy artillery fire, Graeber is only too happy to snatch his first furlough in two years.

Home turns out to be a heap of rubble. Readers of conventional war fiction scarcely need to be told what comes next. Ernst stumbles across Elisabeth, a twenty-year-old with "high-arched brows, dark eyes, and mahogany-colored hair that flowed in a restless wave."

Cigar Boxes. Elisabeth introduces Ernst not only to the hot quick tempo of love on a furlough but to the moral decomposition of Nazi Germany. Her gentle doctor father, informed on by a tenant in his own house, is carted off to a concentration camp, and his ashes are subsequently returned in a cigar box. Ernst charms away such horrors with a symbol, a linden tree flowering affirmatively amid the ruins of his home-town square. Filled with a deep if obscure faith in the future, he marries Elisabeth and goes back to war, only to be killed by some innocent but suspicious Russian peasant prisoners when he frees them. For Ernst, and for the reader, all is finally quiet on the Eastern Front.

Within his tale of love-in-wartime, Author Remarque tries to raise serious questions about German guilt and corruption, and whether a soldier's first duty is to his country or his conscience. Unfortunately, he leaves such passages so dramatically inert that he continually seems to be chewing more than he has really bitten off.

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