Dehumanization, part two of three

In my Wednesday class, on Europe from 1789 to the present, we discussed readings about the First World War. A common theme that jumped out to us from Sassoon's poetry, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Sholokov's Quiet Flows the Don, and even Juenger's The Storm of Steel was the moment a main character had to decide whether to kill the person, the enemy, right in front of him. It seemed to us that each of these stories at some point dealt with the question, why not kill that person? A main character was forced to see the enemy as an individual human. Sometimes this moment resulted in the main character choosing not to kill, sometimes this moment came too late. Against much writing and promotion of duty -- whether the duty owed to one's nation as in, for example, another reading we had from Bernhardi which argued the necessity of war in the abstract, or the duty that overrides one's panic in the trenches as in Juenger's writing -- there certainly seemed to be common theme to undo the dehumanization that had been done.