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Completed	01 August 2007
Title	All Quiet on the Western Front
Author	Erich Maria Remarque
Published	1929
Quote	"Haie Westhus is carried off with his back torn open; you can see the lung throbbing through the wound with every breath he takes. I manage to take his hand --- 'Thats me done for, Paul,' he groans, and bites his arm because of the pain. We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing; we see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away --- they stumble on their splintering stumps to the next shell hole. One lance-corporal crawls for a full half-mile on his hands, dragging his legs behind him, with both knees shattered. Another man makes it to a dressing station with his guts spilling out over his hands as he holds them in. We see soldiers with their mouths missing, with their lower jaws missing, with their faces missing; we find someone who has gripped the main artery in his arm between his teeth for two hours so that he doesnt bleed to death. The sun goes down, night falls, the shells whistle, life comes to an end."
Review	Wow, what a book. I couldn't put it down. And, I can't believe I've never read this great book before, me who likes the study of war. An interesting point: This book, in its original German, was titled Im Westen nichts Neues which translates, literally, as, Nothing New on the Western Front. When the first translator created the English draft in 1929, he changed the title to All Quiet on the Western Front. A good title indeed. But, now that I've spent days and days at the British Library up in Colindale, looking at old newspapers and war correspondence, I have found that the phase "Nothing new happened" is quite common. So, it's a shame that the title was changed like that. It's a double shame because at the very end of the book, when the main guy, Paul Baumer dies, it starts out along the lines of "~Newspapers reports stated that nothing new happened today on the Western Front....," but that's precisely when Paul Baumer gets killed. It's all interesting. Paul Baumer is just nineteen when he joins the German troops, along with his schoolmates. The story follows the group of boys through several years of the war, and it's interesting to see how the boys change during the course of the war. The book leverages the author's own WW1 combat experience and follows the boys on the front line under fire, in the trenches, on leave, in the hospital, surviving a gas attack----all the varied aspects of life at war. If there's one WW1 book you ever read, it should be this one. In the book, they state: "Modern trench warfare demands knowledge and experience, you have to have a good grasp of the lie of the land, have the sounds and effects of the different shells in your ear, you have to be able to work out in advance where they are going to land, what the scatter will be like, how to take cover." At the end of the book, in the Afterward, the translator, Murdoch, writes, that "Much has been made of the idea of comradeship in the novel, as something positive coming out of the war. This again is deceptive ---- it is in fact no more than an artificial solidarity in the face of adversity, though of course real friendships do arise, as is possible anywhere. Remarque made clear in The Road Back (1931, the sequel) how quickly the artificial comradeship of the war crumbled away as returning soldiers settled back into different (and not always justifiable) social levels in civilian life." I don't fully agree with that concept of "artificial comradeship." In fact, I think that friendship through adversity can be the most enduring of all. I am eager to now read the sequel, The Road Back.

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