Reviews

All Quiet on the Western Front (Retold for Children, Abridged) by Erich Maria Remarque

halkid2's review against another edition

5.0

Poetic, Brutal, and Hopeless Account of War

A remarkable and poetic book! No wonder this World War I novel, when it appeared in the late 1920s, almost singlehandedly refashioned the way in which World War I was viewed. It's the single most powerful anti-war novel I've read -- and I have read many books about the two World Wars. In fact it's hard to do this book justice in a simple review.

Remarque lays out the utter futility of war. In language that is direct, concise, and eloquent, he unravels all its bleak layers. Through one German soldier's narration (Paul), we learn about an entire generation of young men -- lost in the inhumane reality and callousness of years in the trenches, overwhelmed by the deeply complex and mixed feelings a few days leave can cause, and relentlessly facing the randomness of sudden injury and death. These are boys really, forced into an initiation into adulthood that involves total immersion into filth, disease, hunger, fear and death -- with virtually no respite. They no longer connect with their families of origin and hold no expectations for any future.

Nothing is left to the imagination. Paul starves, hides, kills, watches inept officers, examines prisoners of war, buries comrades, visits home, and witnesses the uneven quality of medical care to the injured. It's a world where soldiers have only one another for support and comfort. "More intimate than lovers" as Remarque puts it. And yet, at the moment one of their own is about to die, the most pressing concern is who takes possession of the dying friend's still-intact boots.

Often, while reading, I found I needed a break from passages that were so raw, disturbing or poignant. This is certainly not a book for the faint-hearted. It takes stamina to complete. At the same time, I wish it were required reading for any politician or general who thinks conflict is a responsible way to problem solve.

jmarryott23's review against another edition

4.0

4.5 stars… An excellent anti war book from the Germany perspective of WW1. It’s easy to see why Nazi Germany banned this book and forced the author to eventually flee the country. The book does not focus on action so much as emphasizes the horrors of war.

jenniferfrye's review against another edition

5.0

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure 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 its shells, were destroyed by the war.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel of misery and suffering, difficult to get through but profoundly impactful. Remarque unflinchingly explores the cost of war, completely free of idealism or romanticism. It is ugly and horrible and brings one to tears, but provides no catharsis. The prose, meanwhile, is clear, direct (often shockingly so), and achingly beautiful in places.

One element that stands out is the way the novel alternates between brutality and (relative) banality. One chapter is filled with the most violent, heart-wrenching depictions of war; the next opens with a discussion of the difficulties of killing lice. While one soldier is dying, his friend worries how he might sneak away his boots. War is waged against the French and the rats with equal amounts of passion. This contrast and compartmentalization throws both into sharp relief.

Also, Remarque chooses to (almost) entirely forego discussion of the reasons for the war; and, indeed, Paul and his classmates themselves don't themselves care. Peer pressured into joining the military, they are told to kill, and so they do. It makes the loss of life feel that much more meaningless and painful.

I first read this novel as a teenager in school, and certain moments stuck with me but only now, a decade later as an adult, do I really feel the impact; it makes me heartsick, particularly given current events (the Russian invasion of Ukraine).

Some of my highlights:

Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.

Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.

It often seems to me as though it were the vibrating, shuddering air that with a noiseless leap springs upon us; or as though the front itself emitted an electric current which awakened unknown nerve-centres.

An uncertain red glow spreads along the skyline from one end to the other. It is in perpetual movement, punctuated with the bursts of flame from the nozzles of the batteries. Balls of light rise up high above it, silver and red spheres which explode and rain down in showers of red, white, and green stars. French rockets go up, which unfold a silk parachute to the air and drift slowly down. They light up everything as bright as day, their light shines on us and we see our shadows sharply outlined on the ground. They hover for the space of a minute before they burn out. Immediately fresh ones shoot up in the sky, and again green, red, and blue stars. “Bombardment,” says Kat.

It reminds me of flocks of wild geese when I hear them. Last autumn the wild geese flew day after day across the path of the shells.

The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jelly-fish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.

We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don’t talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have. We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have had a single thought in common—now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so intimate that we do not even speak.

The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.

We are deadened by the strain—a deadly tension that scrapes along one’s spine like a gapped knife.

We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down—now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.

we will kill, for they are still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are aimed against us, and if we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us.

Night comes, out of the craters rise the mists. It looks as though the holes were full of ghostly secrets. The white vapour creeps painfully round before it ventures to steal away over the edge. Then long streaks stretch from crater to crater.

It is strange that all the memories that come have these two qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they become so. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures silently, without any word—and it is the alarm of their silence that forces me to lay hold of my sleeve and my rifle lest I should abandon myself to the liberation and allurement in which my body would dilate and gently pass away into the still forces that lie behind these things. They are quiet in this way, because quietness is so unattainable for us now. At the front there is no quietness and the curse of the front reaches so far that we never pass beyond it.

To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled—we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

One morning two butterflies play in front of our trench. They are brimstone-butterflies, with red spots on their yellow wings. What can they be looking for here? There is not a plant nor a flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades—words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly. Yesterday we were under fire, to-day we act the fool and go foraging through the country-side, tomorrow we go up to the trenches again. We forget nothing really. But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago. I soon found out this much:—terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

But most beautiful are the woods with their line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky—then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves. I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transparent shadow, that I almost fail to hear the commands. It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world’s condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles’ beards. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free. I am frightened: I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss. It is not now the time but I will not lose these thoughts, I will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended.

But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts. I would give much if he would but stay alive. It is hard to lie here and to have to see and hear him. In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I breathe freely again. But only for a short time. Soon the silence is more unbearable than the groans. I wish the gurgling were there again, gasping, hoarse, now whistling softly and again hoarse and loud.

This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything in order to save myself;

We have to take things as lightly as we can, so we make the most of every opportunity, and nonsense stands stark and immediate beside horror.

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.

Spoiler

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

auntieg0412's review against another edition

5.0

This book speaks for itself so eloquently and poignantly that any words I could come up with would be an insult to it, really. It is, in my opinion, a must-read for everyone.

clcbrownie's review against another edition

5.0

Memorable

The harsh brutal reality of this book will linger in my mind. Reading this during the Covid-19 crisis has definitely reset my perspective. I wonder that any men could experience this and rejoin civilian life.

emtayshafer's review against another edition

5.0

This is a moving tale of the real-life horrors of war for soldiers in WWI. Many accounts of war stories do not give insight into the mind of a soldier during the thick of battle, but Remarque lets us see the soldier at his lowest, and what he will do to survive.