Although they bear some minor similarities, the differences between All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque and Unbroken reveal how the effects of war can drastically change the people involved in it and how they think. At the beginning of the book, Paul and Muller visit Kimmerich in the hospital because he is injured. After coming back, they keep thinking about how much they want Kimmerich’s boots. Kimmerich had his leg amputated, so they see no need for him to have two good boots. They aren’t at all concerned about Kimmerich and if he’s going to live or not, only his boots.
Paul explains in the book, “We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us.” (21). This shows how Paul and his friends have to change their thought process if they want to survive the war. They cannot afford to become emotionally attached to anything, such as the death of a fellow soldier. The only thing they should care about is surviving the devastating war.
Another example of war changing people is when Paul is granted a leave and visits home. He feels strange being at home, as he isn’t used to it. He describes, “I imagined leave would be different from this. Indeed, it was different a year ago. It is I of course that have changed in the interval. There lies a gulf between that time and today. At that time I still knew nothing about the war, we had been only in quiet sectors. But now I see that I have been crushed without knowing it. I find I do not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.” (173).
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Paul is basically saying that he feels more comfort in the front with his fellow soldiers than at home with his family. This further proves how much war changes people. In Unbroken, when Louie and Phil are captured by the Japanese after their plane crashed, they are taken to a Japanese prison camp where they are treated extremely harshly and tortured. The orders given to the Japanese cause them to see their prisoners as less than human, as they don’t have even a hint of remorse for them.
In the movie, it is said that, “Japanese policy held that camp commanders could not, under any circumstances, allow Allied forces to recapture POWs. […] POWs were to be executed.” This shows that they were treated them so inhumanely that they couldn’t let them live to tell their tale. Louie also explains that, “The extremely low caloric intake and befouled food, coupled with the exertion of the forced exercise, put the men’s lives in great danger,” Which further proves how the Japanese didn’t treat them POWs like humans. Even though both the movie and the book talk about the effect of war in different ways, they both still show how drastically war changes a person’s mindset.
Another way that Paul is changed mentally is when he is talking with some fellow soldiers. They started discussing what they would do when the war was over, and they realized that they had no idea what they would do. He explains in the book, “The war has ruined us for everything.” (87). This is a mental change because they have gotten so used to the war that they can’t imagine life without it. Before the war, Paul and his friends had a whole life to look forward to, but since they enlisted in the army and joined the war, they will be scarred for life when it’s over, if they don’t die. Another example is when Paul says, “When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual.
So I say rather impatiently: ‘He died immediately. He felt absolutely nothing at all. His face was quite calm.”” (239). This shows that even though Paul has seen many of his friends and fellow soldiers die, and he still feels uneasy whenever he sees a dead body, being in the war has made his accustomed to seeing people close to you die. It is possible that, when confronting Kimmerich’s mother with the bad news, he is scared that he’ll be affected by her sadness, and if he begins to become emotional as he was before the war, he might never get used to the tragedy of war again.
In Unbroken, Phil describes that, “[Louie] was condemned to crawl through the filth of a pig’s sty, picking up feces with his bare hands, and cramming handfuls of the animal’s feed into his mouth to save himself from starving to death,” showing that they are treated so harshly and fed so little that they resort to drastic measures to make sure they don’t starve. To conclude, war changes how the soldiers think. They no longer value the lives of fellow soldiers, just their own. Even after the war, most soldiers are traumatized and don’t see the world as they used to.
