All Quiet On The Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque

In All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, Paul Bäumer enlists in the army as an enthusiastic soldier, but while in the trenches he displays the horrors of war. Before World War I, battle was glorified, but after the Great War there was a shift between emphasizing war to portraying the dangers of it. This book displays the terror within the western trenches and how it affects the soldiers in a realistic, non-heroic way. The new modern shift is caused by the intense amount of soldiers dead from World War I. One of the main shifts in the view of war portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front is through the new soldiers brought into the trenches after their training. As they are in the middle of a shell attack, the

Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Napoleon Crossing the Alps is a great example of glorifying war. Within the painting, it portrays Napoleon riding a horse pointing in the direction at which he intends on leading his men into battle. The overall image exemplifies a focus on being very strong, masculine, and superior. Napoleon’s superiority is shown through his clothing, and the horse standing up and being white. These kind of images make war seem as if it is a game; whoever wins gets the prizes of money, land, and status. Although this image makes war look very heroic, after World War I paintings began to portray war as a horrific setting. One particular painting is Eric Kennington’s Gassed and Wounded. In this image, he accentuates the men that are injured by contrasting their faces against the background. The healthy men are all shadowed and their faces are not seen. Kennington has contrasted the image this way to change the focus of the photo to the people injured, not to the people that are still healthy. This painting shows the consequences of a gas attack, while in David’s painting, there are no consequencesㅡonly