War & Peace Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

Remarque’s line weaponizes a bitter paradox: the people tasked with shaping you become your first captors. By singling out the non-commissioned officer and the schoolmaster, he targets the petty sovereigns of modern life, the middle managers of obedience. They don’t need the grand ideology of generals or ministers; their authority is intimate, daily, humiliating. That’s why they feel like “more of an enemy” than they would “if they were free.” The sting is that the system doesn’t just oppress from above; it recruits ordinary people to administer it, and in doing so it deforms them, too.

The phrasing is telling. “Any” turns these figures into types, not exceptions, suggesting a structural problem rather than a few bad apples. The recruit and the pupil are paired because the pipeline is the point: school trains the body and mind for the barracks, and the barracks completes the job. Remarque’s broader project in All Quiet on the Western Front is to show how war begins long before the trench, in classrooms and drill yards where masculinity, patriotism, and fear of shame are taught as reflexes.

The subtext is resentment mixed with clarity. The NCO and schoolmaster are not merely cruel; they’re unfree themselves, performing discipline to justify their small slice of power. Their hostility becomes a kind of compensation. Remarque isn’t romanticizing “freedom” so much as exposing how institutions manufacture enemies out of mentors, turning education and training into rehearsals for violence.