Wilfred Owen’s famous poem was written sometime in 1918 although not published until 1919 after his death. It would be interesting to compare this poem with the harrowing night patrol described by Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front.
Owen’s poem concludes with the lines
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now . . .
On night patrol in Remarque’s novel the narrator, Paul, is trapped in a large shell-hole as dawn arrives. A French attack begins and a running soldier crashes into the hole. Paul’s immediate instinct is to stab him and he acts without a second thought killing the soldier. As he waits to either escape or be rescued he contemplates the killing:
The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: “Comrade, I did not want to kill you. if you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform, you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.