This old book of 296 pages, first published in 1928 in German, is often considered the "greatest war novel of all time," and it is almost unbearable to read. Who knows if it is "the best?" That's immaterial and moot. There is no glory here, no swashbuckling heroism, and no adulation of the honor of dying for no discernible reason. It is simply a plain, gorgeous story about the awfulness of war.
A young German, Paul, age 20, serving in the army, is the narrator, his story told in first person. He and his buddies, as the war claims them one by one, endure 3 years of World War I trench warfare on the French-German lines. They knit themselves into a fierce family of unlikely comrades. They love one another desperately and despair that when the war is over, they will not know what to do with themselves. They only know death, killing and horror.
Blood, death, despair, inhuman conditions, and frailty abound. Lice and rancid food characterize their daily life. Fear, grief and compassion fill their hearts. Paul nearly loses his mind when he has to kill a Frenchman, a guy with a wife and child at home, and then has to endure a couple of nights with him in his shell-hole. He apologies to the body and begs it for forgiveness.
Page 115, "The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers."
Paul's first home leave is beyond painful. It humiliates and degrades. The reader cringes and shies away from the pages of Paul's visit to his home village and family. The psychological toll of war on everyone overwhelms. Paul's hospital stay after being wounded, is a ghastly indictment of all who wage war and even of those who try to help the injured.
While welcome and very funny, the occasional army style bad-boy antics and the ever-present gallows humor are the things that keep the men sane - or does it? They distract themselves to distraction.
The prose is Hemingway-like in its terse, simple-sentence style. Sometimes the translation suffers from its own tell-tale German "accent." In all, the writing is irredeemably blunt and yet does not offend.
Remarque speaks to us through Paul, and he speaks for all of us. Like the movie "Gallipoli," which is the best anti-war movie I've ever seen, this book is the one of the best anti-war statements in print.
"All Quite on the Western Front" is terribly difficult to read. It is grisly and graphic. But read it we must.
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DOES NOT OPEN IN IPAD!!!!.
It opens in a kindle on windows and IPHONE perfectly fine, but does not open in a Ipad which is what I bought for my daughters class requirement. It also costs a heck a lot more $8 VS $1 for this version versus the one I purchased that opens in IPAD.
Top reviews from other countries
Guilherme Elias
com quantas vidas se faz uma guerra?
Reviewed in Brazil on September 5, 2024
Guilherme Elias
Reviewed in Brazil on September 5, 2024
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jose mejia
glad i decided to read this after watching the netflix film
Reviewed in Mexico on August 7, 2023
