'No human's land': Comparing war rhetoric and collective sacrifice in the Great War with the pandemic

To fight off COVID-19, governments across the world have effectively declared 'War', deploying pseudo-military tactics and wartime measures against the invisible 'enemy invasion' represented by the virus, including enforced restrictions, curfews, isolation measures and an insistence on the collective effort that all law-abiding citizens need to endure. Such a condition is in no way novel and its effects, however necessary, find striking parallels in the anti-war novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front' by Eric Maria Remarque (1929), who witnessed and reported the horrors of warfare, as an adolescent fighting in Verdun. With just over a hundred years of difference, I will use Remarque's controversial testimony as a guide to drawing parallels between the trench war malaise and the lockdown life, the new normality the post-pandemic/post-war situation has imposed, the legacy of shell-shock/Long COVID, along with the wiping away of any sense of place, and what was 'before', forming rather a truly 'No Human's Land'. Overall, this chapter claims that, since War is the most horrific engagement humankind has ever produced, to wage it mindlessly - or quite the opposite, purposely - has enduring consequences to which, as with the original post-war period, we are perhaps only at the verge.