Free Essays - All Quiet on the Western Front :: All Quiet on the Western Front Essays

All restrained on the Western Front  Erich Maria Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the greatest war novels of all time. It is a story, not of Germans, but of men, who even though they may perk up dull loose shells, were destroyed by the war.  The entire purpose of this novel is to illustrate the lifelike horror and raw nature of war and to change the popular tenet that war is an idealistic and romantic character.  The story centers on Paul Ba&252mer, who enlists in the German legions with glowing enthusiasm.  But in the range of war, he is consumed by it and in the end is weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.  Through Ba&252mer, Remarque examines how war makes man inhuman.  He uses excellent words and phrases to describe significant details to this theme. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts.  Ba&252mer and his classmates who enlisted into the army see the true reality of the war.  They enter the war fresh from school, lettered nothing except the environment of hopeful youth and they come to a premature maturity with the war, their scarcely home. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the serviceman and we had to shoot it to pieces.  We are not youth any longer. They have bemused their innocents.  Everything they are taught, the world of work, duty, culture, and progress are not the slightest use to them because the only thing they need to know is how to survive.  They need to know how to escape the shells as well as the emotional and psychological torment of the war. The war takes an dour toll on the soldiers who fight in it. The terror of death go out infest the minds of soldiers and bring about horrible images of death and destruction until they break down and go to pieces.  Every hour and eachday, every shell and every death cuts this thin line of sanity, and the years waste it rapidly.  In these dangerous moments, anybod y would have gone mad, have deserted their post, or have fallen.  It takes a particular(a) kind of soldier to deal with this emotional abuse a soldier who will not go to pieces at the sight of a mangle body it takes a soldier like Ba&252mer.  Ba&252mer has expectant accustomed to it war is the cause of death like influenza and dysentery.