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All Quiet on the Western Front
By: Erich Maria Remarque
¬According to the Author-What is war and what were its effects (physically and psychologically) on the individual, generation, and country?

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adven-ture to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war…” (Remarque, 1996, preface). The purpose of this passage taken from the preface of the novel is to steer the reader in the direction of what is to be expected in the coming pages. For unlike other novels on WWI such as Stephen Cranes, Red Badge of Courage, that romanticize war through duty, honor and glory, Remarque’s statement that the books is “least of all an adventure” solely describes war as is. All Quiet on the Western Front is a story, not of Germans, but of men, who even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. The purpose of this novel is to exemplify the vivid horror, raw nature and human cost of war and to describe its affects on the individual, the generation and the country.
The front is the ever constant setting of this novel, which makes it fitting for Remarque to focus the wars anguish on the soldiers who fight in the fronts trenches. Before the war, Paul the protagonist of the novel explained, “We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces” (Remarque, 1996, p.88). Now, the men were subject to be attacked at any moment and the living conditions of the war took a toll physically on them, as well. The trenches were sodden ditches full of rats, decaying corpses and infested with lice. Sometimes bombings would uncover old graves and the rotting corpses would then lie next to the newly deceased. The reality that the dead and the living existed and functioned on the...