Customer Reviews:
An anti-war statement without peer...from a German soldier, yet
All Quiet on the Western Front has been on book lists since my high school days. I should have read and re-read it many years ago. It is only the first statement I ever read from a German Foot Soldier...a hero in my eyes. The author, Erich Remarque, was wounded five times in the "Great War". The book was Banned by the Nazis, maybe the best reason to read it. It begins in naive sounding prose, giving the background for the strong friendships that develop later, under fire. The first-person account of Paul Baumer relates the painful deaths of his buddies, one by one, and his first wartime kill...a French soldier who jumps into his shell crater. In hand to hand combat, Paul fatally stabs the soldier, but vainly attempts to save him, as he reasons that neither should be in the situation. The final straw is the unsuccessful attempt he makes to save his closest buddy, Kat. The sadness is palpable and intense. I must re-read this magnificent work.

good book
This book came fairly quickly and I was very satisfied with the condition it's in. Nice doing business with you!

Great Story
Having been in the military, this book brings back the bad memories of the BS that I endured in the seven years I spent in it, and that was quite enough. In this book you find the horrors of trench warfare that defined WWI. This book rarely loses speed, albeit slightly when he is on leave at his home base. The characters are rich and the dialogue entertaining. The savageness of the shelling and gassing, the brutality of hand to hand, and the rare compassion intermixed, it's all here. Add to that the constant need to keeping enough food, and the excellent writing. It is no wonder it is a staple in any bookstore. Five Stars.

This edition is abridged!
This edition (Pacemaker Classics paperback) is abridged and that is not indicated anywhere! Very frustrating!

A generation of men destroyed by the war
In this rightly called classic anti-war novel, E.M. Remarque depicts forcefully the brutal awakening of a group of young soldiers in World War I.

Failed education, breakdown of ideals
The preachers glorified the Fatherland, the romantic character of war. For them, duty to one's country should be the greatest thing. But, they concealed the real interests behind the war, the rulers, the war profiteers and their acolytes.
The first death in war shattered all belief that authority was a synonym for greater insight and more human wisdom. The recruits immediately felt that the army leaders considered them as beasts, training them as `circus-ponies'.
The romantic war turned into butchery: `if we were to give morphia to everyone, we would have to had tubs full.'

Universal comradeship and the ideal solution
In direct confrontations, the soldiers came to understand that the enemies were in fact brothers: `Comrade, I did not want to kill you. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction ... Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother.'
The ideal solution is to consider war `as a bullfight. The ministers and generals of the countries (in war), armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be more simple and just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.'

Promise not fulfilled
`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 a culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood. I see how people are set against one another and foolishly, obediently slay one another. I see that the keenest of brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen again!'

Strong scenes and metaphors
About war: `three enemy trenches with their garrison, all stiff as though stricken with apoplexy, with blue faces, dead.'
About war and peace: `We hear the muffled rumble of the front only as a distant thunder, bumblebees droning by quite drown it. Around us stretches the flowery meadow.'
About death: `These nails will continue to grow like fantastic cellar plants. They twist themselves into corkscrews and grow and with them the hair on the decaying skull, just like grass in good soil.'

Unforgettably, E. M. Remarque evoked in a highly emotional language the tragic fate of a lost generation. But also, it was `of no account'. The war machine continued to rumble all over the world.

I also highly recommend the hard-hitting and very insightful memoirs from the other side of the channel written by Robert Graves in `Goodbye to All That.'
These books stand in sharp contrast with `the ice cold hedonist attitude within plain Barbarism' (T. Mann) expressed in the texts of Ernst Jünger about the same war.

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