War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings

Chapter 10: All Quiet on the Midwestern Front “Soldier’s Home”

all QuIeT on THe MIdWesTern FronT “Soldier’s Home” William Blazek “We give up part of our morality to go to war. It allows us to survive; it allows us to kill.” —The Wounded Platoon “Returning from the initiatory space of the battlefield to the normal world is every bit as mysterious a journey as entering the Temple of Mars. The world you left behind has changed and you have changed. You know parts of yourself that you, and those you’ve lived with all your life, never knew before [ . . . ] Ultimately, you’ve been in touch with the infinite, and now you are trying to reconcile yourself to the mundane.” —Karl Marlantes What is expected of combat soldiers in wartime—voluntarily exposing themselves to sudden death and participating in a form of licensed killing —is proscribed to most citizens in peacetime, and the extreme dialectic between the killing environment of the Western Front and the postwar Oklahoma town that Harold Krebs returns to in “Soldier’s Home” is the starting point for my analysis of the text. Like Hemingway’s short story and Remarque’s war novel, my title contains some necessary irony in that I wish to argue that Krebs’s hometown is disquieted by the combat soldier’s 169 170 william blaZek return and is fundamentally disturbed by the native son, who brings back with him martial and sexual experience that poses uncomfortable questions for his family and his community. The apostrophe in the title “Soldier’s Home”—whether read as a possessive to indicate “the home of the soldier,” or as a contraction to read “the soldier is home”—is significant not only for indicating the fraught relationship between the soldier and his home, but also for its visual opacity, a tiny marker, both precise and open-ended, which indicates the larger subtexts beneath the surface action of the narrative to follow. Much like the German family name Krebs1—which can be translated variously (as David W. Ullrich has noted) as “crab, cancer, or the zodiac sign Cancer”—the title’s apostrophe acts as a sideways-stepping creature inhabiting the permeable borders of language and interpretation, a small typographical daub that establishes the indeterminacy and inward trajectory of the text. Harold Krebs brings from Europe the cancerous reminders of death and the exposed body to his insulated hometown; and this combat soldier’s uncelebrated, non-heroic return to the United States in 1919—in his and the town’s imagination “years after the war was over” (Hemingway, In Our Time 69)—reinforces a view of civilization itself as a death-making machine. Moreover, appreciating such deep implications of the killer’s return home depends on a particular aspect of reader participation , as defined by Beatriz Penas Ibáñez: [ . . . ] activated by an incomplete form, [the reader’s imagination] can infer the missing portions which although invisible exist and can be retrieved or inferred or reappropriated through personal interpretation. Hemingway’s iceberg theory of writing is also a theory of reading, one that seeks to engage readers in a creative kind of reading that matches his own creativity as a writer. (156–157) Ruben de Baerdemaeker’s challenging critical study of performative patterns in “Soldier’s Home” closes with the assertion that “The reader is pushed to the outside of the story in the same way that Krebs is pushed to the outside of a society that cannot accommodate him or his story” (71). My own focus is on the connection between this effort to exclude and the ways in which the text also follows an inward direction that draws the reader into the gray depths of Krebs’s return to a former home that is now unwelcoming because the combat veteran brings back from the fields of all Quiet on the midwestern front 171 battle the raw facts of human survival, an experience with violence and licentiousness that now must be licensed, and a reminder of death that cannot be buried. I am indebted to Steven Trout for his work in documenting the historical context of the returning World War I veteran in relation to “Soldier’s Home,” but I hope to turn his analysis inward, also—not to demonstrate how the story “constitutes a withering critique of a society that has, in effect, left its returning soldiers homeless” (19), but to show how the returning combat soldier is a dangerous presence in his hometown, perceived...