Life & Wisdom Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

Paranoia doesn’t arrive with a bang in Remarque; it creeps up on sentry duty and learns to breathe in the dark. The Russians here are not introduced as people, or even as a clearly defined enemy force, but as silhouettes: “forms” that move “like stick storks, like great birds.” The simile is doing double duty. It makes them eerie and almost prehistoric, but also fragile, underfed, oddly graceful - creatures built from bone and hunger. “Stick” is the key insult war adds to the body: it reduces men to anatomy.

Remarque’s intent isn’t to demonize the other side so much as to show how war’s conditions distort perception. In darkness, the mind fills in blanks with fear, and the enemy becomes animal, apparition, instinct. Yet the image swings toward intimacy: they “come close up,” press “faces” to the wire, hook “fingers” into the mesh. That wire fence is the modern front line distilled - an industrial grid that turns human contact into a prison gesture. Faces and fingers are the most recognizable human parts, the ones that plead and communicate, and Remarque isolates them as if the rest of the body has already been surrendered to mud and uniform.

Context matters: Remarque writes out of World War I’s trench reality, where “the Russians” are less a political abstraction than a recurring presence across a barrier. The subtext is bleakly anti-heroic. Guarding isn’t bravery here; it’s vigilance against your own empathy, against the terrifying possibility that the figure at the fence is just another soldier trapped in the same mechanism. War makes monsters of men, then shows you the monsters have hands.