Is Reflected In Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

In the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque,in the epigraph he states,” Even though they may have escaped [the] shells, [they] were destroyed by the war”(Remarque Epigraph). The soldiers were destroyed in many ways, and one of them is that although they would return home they would still be thinking of the war and of the front, be it in thoughts of their friends, or nightmares. Also those that return home may not know what to door even if they can do anything. This is shown throughout World War One, in which this book was written. This is show in the book when “Müller… says:‘Albert, what would you do if it were suddenly peace-time again’” and Albert responded,”There won’t be any peace-time”(Remarque 76). Even Paul “can’t even imagine… [or] see anything at all”(Remarque 87). They also lost touch with anything from their previous life and it “has become so unreal… [that they] cannot comprehend it any more”(Remarque 19).
It shows how the soldiers do not know what to do when they get home when Paul finds that he does “not belong [there]” and that “it is a foreign world”(Remarque 168). He also knows that the people around him have “worries,

One such example is Pte Christopher Massie who had an amputated arm and could not think of a job for an amputee began to think, “Now I shall never work again. I suppose they will give me a sum of money and, after that is gone, I shall have to beg or starve”(A Very Bitter Victory). There are also the cases of shell shock. Shell shock is “the blanket term applied by contemporaries to those soldiers who broke down under the strain of war”(Trench Conditions). One case had a soldier have a dream “occur 'right in the middle of an ordinary conversation' when 'the face of a Boche that [they] have bayoneted, with its horrible gurgle and grimace, [came] sharply into view'”(Bourke). Also there are case of being “unable to