All Quiet On The Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque

Hardships faced in World War 1

War can be compared to an everlasting fever with tremendous side effects, no one, in particular, wants it, but, all at once there it is. Combat before World War 1 had the usage of inefficient had to hand weapons like knives and regular bayonets. Killing mass numbers of people was not as effective as during World War 1 as technology developed to kill more efficiently. Knives and bayonets turned into machine guns, slow marching troops were transported by tanks and submarines, poison gas and barbed wires replaced shields. The novel, ’All Quiet on the Western Front’, written by Erich Maria Remarque, who served in the German army during the war. Remarque, known for shining a light on the true horrors of war with

Paul and his comrade, Albert Kropp were taken to a Catholic war hospital because they were shot in the leg. As Paul heals, he limped around the hospital looking at all the other injuries as he sees, “shattered bones hanging free in the air from a gallows; underneath the wound, a basin is placed, into which drips the pus.”(Remarque Ch.#10) Through this Remarque shows us that war is very dangerous as it shatters bones into pieces in a way that it can never heal using imagery. This is abominable because of the amount of pain that one has to go through while suffering that injury. Shattered bones are only a part of what war injuries looked like when compared to all the other wound in the millions of war hospitals there were. Paul thought of the number of hospitals like the one he was in and how many more people found injured or dead in them. He thought to himself that the war was senseless because there was no way to prevent it from happening because, “the culture of thousands of years could not prevent this stream of blood from being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundred of thousands.”(Remarque Ch.#10) Remarque compares the war hospitals to torture chambers filled with pain and despair, metaphorically. It is horrifying how nothing can prevent a disaster like war and the damages that it causes, letting us compare it to a shadowy valley of gloom. Throughout the novel, Remarque tries to tell us how the war destroyed the lives of the ’lost generation’ and how affected they were by shell