All Quiet on the Western Front 2
All Quiet On the Western FrontAll Quiet?
World War I was one of the most brutal wars ever, more than 37 million were killed or wounded and it cost an estimated 38 billion dollars, but its wrath only began with the physical damage it caused. For the soldiers that survived the fighting, the true battle had just begun. War negatively effects the individual not only in the physical sense but also in the psychological sense. Erich Maria Remarque�s All Quiet On the Western Front accurately portrays these negative effects on the individual during war. This novel is told through the first person protagonist of Paul B�umer, a nineteen-year-old German soldier of his experiences during World War I. Remarque makes a powerful disclaimer at the beginning of the book stating. �This book is 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 shells, were destroyed by the war.� The war stripped these men were of everything they had and they couldn�t fit in with the post-war world. This novel shows how a war breaks down a soldier�s mind, it destroys their past, future, morals, and most of all their innocence. All Quiet on the Western Front precisely illustrates the destruction of the life of a soldier during war.
War rapes the individual of all their past knowledge that is not relevant to the situation at hand. All B�umer ever knew before the war, was school. As naive teenagers, B�umer and his friends dreamed of war, as a heroic deed they never thought it could be such a miserable wasteland of broken and battered men. Many men dreamed of going home, but when they got there everything was different to them. Paul realizes that his whole life, spent on school, was a waste.
War had changed everything for them. They dreamed of going back to the way things were, and forgetting the war. Their schoolbook knowledge was useless in the war, it couldn�t help them survive, and more practical ideas replaced it.
We remember mighty little of all that rubbish. Anyway, it has never been the slightest use to us. At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.
Remarque uses irony in this passage; it is hard to believe that ten weeks of boot camp can be more valuable than ten years of school. The men feel that they are different now. They have long forgotten math, German...
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