All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is a story told by a soldier named Paul Bäumer about his experiences during World War I. The war lasted from 1914 to 1918 affecting a whole generation of young men across the world. There was so much death during the WWI that sometimes families would lose more than one soldier. Paul describes how horrendous death was in the book. This showed readers the true insight of war at the time.
Paul and his six friends from his class all joined the war to fight with Germany. Kantorek was their school teacher who persuaded the boys to join the fighting. In the book, Paul describes the war and how meticulous it was for men of all ages fighting against each other because of the simple fact: leaders could not dispute between themselves. After they enlist, they go through a
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One example of this was when Paul talked about how the war made the soldiers feel out of place anywhere except on the front. He explained it as, “We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamented enough in peacetime, would be out of place here”(139). They had to have a mindset of survival all the time. They did not have the time to think about family or friends during the war, so when the soldiers got home, they felt awkward because they did not have to encounter family oriented feelings like his family did. “When he sees that we cannot escape because under the sharp fire we must make the most of this cover, he takes a rifle, crawls out of the hole, and lying down propped on his elbows, he takes aim. He fires – the same moment a bullet smacks into him, they have got him”(283-284). The soldiers had to kill people. This was a part of their everyday lives now, and it did not phase them to kill. It was either kill or be killed. It was during this time that killing another man for the simple fact that he was the enemy became second