All Quiet on the Western Front (Hardcover)

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is the story of Paul Baumer, a young German soldier serving in the trenches in France. Baumer's story is not a pleasant one; he volunteered for the war when his instructor in school, Kantorek, urged the class to join up for the glory of Germany. After a rigorous period of military training (where Paul and his buddies meet the hated drill instructor Himmelstoss, a recurring character throughout the book), Baumer and his friends go to the front as infantrymen. Filled with glorious ideas about war by authority figures back home, Baumer quickly discovers that the blood-drenched trenches of the Western Front are a quagmire of misery and violent death. As soon as the first shells explode in the mud Paul and his friends realize everyone back home is a liar, that war is not the glorious transformation of boys into men but rather the systematic destruction of all that is decent and healthy. As Paul's friends slip away one by one through death, desertion, and injury, Paul begins to wonder about his own life and whether he will survive not only the war but also a world without war.

Remarque's book exposes all of the insanities of war. The incongruities of violent battle versus long periods of boredom repeatedly appear throughout the book. On one day, Paul and his friends sit around discussing mundane topics; the next day they are bashing French skulls during an offensive. It is these extremes that caused so many problems with the psychological disposition of the men. In one chapter of the book, Paul and several new recruits, hunkered down in a dugout, withstand hour upon hour of continuous shellfire until one of the green recruits snaps and tries to make a run for freedom. Where else but in a war could one walk through a sea of corpses while enjoying the sunshine and the gentle cadences of the birds in the trees? That such an unnatural activity as mass murder takes place surrounded by the natural beauty of the world is a theme found in many World War I authors and poets. Remarque's book is noteworthy because he does a better job of showing this strange duality than other writers.

Also of interest is that this book views the war from the German side. From what I read recently, the Germans had a tough time throughout the war with rations, troop rotations away from the front, and supplies. This is apparent in Remarque's treatment of the German war effort, especially toward the end of the book when Germany begins to retreat in the face of overwhelming American military power. Paul's remarks about the evil presence of tanks are an interesting insight into the effect those iron behemoths had on the ill-equipped and exhausted Germans.

The cover of this edition trumpets this as "the greatest war novel of all time." And so it is, but not in the way some people might think. This is the greatest war novel ever because Remarque's book is anti-war. Those that read "All Quiet on the Western Front" will see warfare stripped of its flag waving, parades, and John Wayne glory. War is death, with the glory going to the few who survive. Remarque makes a brilliant contribution to world literature with this riveting novel.

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The story is gritty, dirty and depressing. It probably isn't exactly explaining what life was like for the German soldiers during WWI, but my guess is that it comes extremely close. The men have trouble finding food, they are ordered around by sadistic officers, they are cold, and hungry - and there's a war going on, the nature of which means that literally at any second they could be killed or horribly maimed. The book focuses on the death associated with the war, but it also spends a lot of time going over the suffering and the pain. Remarque tells us of the soldiers wounded, of those slowly dying in no-man's land with no hope of being rescued or of dying a clean death. The lucky ones are the ones who die quickly; the unlucky are in agony for days or weeks.

There really isn't much of a plot, which would certainly seem to be in keeping with the way an average solider would view the war. The narrative bounces us around from the front lines, to the rear camps, to civilian villages in a sequence as random as it would have appeared to anyone involved in the war. We can't see the reasoning behind any individual movement, and neither can our protagonist. They are concerned only with the moment, the simple things that will keep them alive and as comfortable as possible. Their occasional contacts with home and with civilian life highlight how different they have become and the difficulties the survivors will face when they attempt to reintegrate themselves with their old lives.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is a book that everyone should read, just so that the story of the average soldier is always carried on. Even as television brings cursory and unrepresentative images of the battlefield to regular citizens, it is vital that everyone fully understands the horror that war is. I can't say that this was a pleasant read, but it was a book that I found difficult to put down.

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