Book #146: All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

 All Quiet On The Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque

 Released: January 29th, 1929

My 12th book for 2026 was Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet On The Western Front".  

This is often cited as one of the greatest novels of all time.  It is a deeply intense look at the activities of war.  It follows a unit of young men fighting for Germany in World War 1 in the 1910’s.  

We follow our main character Paul Bäumer as he describes the horrific events going on around him.  He loses feeling as time goes on.  His happiness is taken from him, and he suffers deep loss of comrades and brotherhood unions formed by their service.

The men encounter a brothel with French women.  They trade loaves of army bread in exchange for a night of intimacy.  While they share excitement over this, Paul doesn't feel the connective passion that usually comes from a sexual experience.  To him, this is more of just a dead feeling to satisfy a bodily need.  He feels that he will never truly feel that deep sort of connection again, because the war has changed him.

Paul is forced to kill a solider and shows deep remorse for killing him.  He knows the man is dead, but see pictures of his wife and children, and understands that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He also thinks outside the box in that it easily could have been the other way around.  His fellow soldiers explain how most just deal with the loss of life more apathetically, but Paul takes a bit longer to forget about the lost man.

There is a feeling of lifelessness that stems from this novel.  Despite surviving various obstacles, there is a sense that none of the soldiers will ever return to a normal lifestyle.  Paul has difficulty connecting with his family on leave and does not feel the same joy from life activities due to his time in the war.

Another interesting fact is that this book is about a German unit.  Typically, when someone things about the first 2 World Wars, Germany is seen as the villains of the war.  This book paints a portrait of the front-line soldiers feeling like pawns escaping death in a heartbeat, or getting caught with fatal wounds that ultimately claim their lives.  It brings about a new perspective that most people in the western world would not commonly expect to read about.

The book is a deeply moving piece and really highlights the difficulties that the enlisted face when carrying out wartime operations.  Loss of life is a very realistic concept.  The sense of death and dread surround the men.  They see how difficult medical support is when in the field and see how many of their own encounter some painful and excruciating deaths from their wounds.  I struggled reading it a bit because while I understand the general concepts of war, I feel someone who has served in the military or has seen action in the field would have a greater...hmm...I don't want to say appreciation in the excited sense, so I'll saying understanding of what is taking place.  All of the World War I generation has passed away by this point in time.  So while we can read their writings and attempt to piece together the feeling and general sense of the time period, there is no personal account remaining to vividly describe the horrors of the conflict.

Here is what I learned.

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• Written by a World War I veteran.
• 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 shells, were destroyed by the war.
• The soldiers eat beef and haricot beans.
• They have a double ration of sausage and bread.
• Tjaden has high metabolism
• Each man is given 10 cigars, 20 cigarettes, and 2 quits of chew.
• Albert Kropp is the clearest thinker among the soldiers, and is a lance-corporal.
• Müller is interested in science.
• Leer has a beard.
• The narrator Paul Bäumer is a 19-year old volunteer for the war effort.
• Tjaden is a locksmith.
• Haie Westhus is a peat digger.
• Detering is a peasant who dreams of his farmland and wife.
• Stanislaus Katczinsky is the leader of the group.
• Heinrich is a sergeant-cook.
• “Eighty men can’t have what is meant for a hundred and fifty.”
• Kemmerich has a flesh wound in his thigh.
• “It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
• Behm was one of the first to fall.  He was hit in the eye during an attack and was left for dead.
• Kemmerich has lost his foot.
• “For us young men of twenty everything is extraordinarily vague, for Kropp, Müller, Leer, and for me, for all of us whom Kantorek calls the "Iron Youth." All the older men are linked up with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have only our parents, and some, perhaps, a girl— that is not much, for at our age the influence of parents is at its weakest and girls have not yet got a hold over us. Besides this there was little else some enthusiasm, a few hobbies, and our school. Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.”
• Corporal Himmelstoss is the strictest disciplinarian in the camp.
• Franz Kemmerich dies in Bed 26.
• Tjaden’s national dish is broad beans and bacon.
• “Give ‘em all the same grub and all the same pay, and the war would be over and done in a day.”
• Löhne is a railway junction.
• The unit practices Löhne for hours.
• Tjaden has a special grudge against Himmelstoss over the way he was educated in the barracks.
• The crew sneaks out and whip Himmelstoss in revenge.
• Detering is upset about horses being used in war.
• Kat and Paul debate putting a young recruit down with a round.
• After the first bombardment. There are 5 dead and 8 wounded.
• Two are lying in upended graves and have dirt tossed on them.
• Tjaden faces 5 days arrest for disobeying a superior.
• “The war has robbed us for everything.”




War page 59




• Geese have strong kicks.
• The enemies carry water bottles of cognac.
• The Company Commander offers 3 extra days of leave to anyone who retrieves a wounded soldier from the trenches.
• Albert gets the love of his war shot off while looking and doesn’t return.
• Paul is given 17 days leave.  14 for leave, and 3 for travel.
• Paul struggles on leave, seeing it as a foreign world.
• The Germans have Russians POWs in their training camp.
• A pair of boots costs 2-3 loaves of army bread.
• “Their life is obscure and guiltless;-if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what their burdens are, then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.”
• Paul’s mother is suffering from cancer.
• She is in Luisa Hospital.
• “These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.”
• Paul feels remorse for a man he must kill in cold blood.
• “Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed.  But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."
• The man Paul has killed is Gérald Duval, compositor.
• Pancakes are Paul’s favorite dish.
• Fresh baby pig is very griping to the bowels.
• Albert’s leg is amputated.
• He is feeling suicidal because of it.
• Peter survived the “Dying Room”.
• Lewandowski and his wife make love in the same room as the other soldiers.
• The new bandages are made of white crêpe paper.
• The soldiers suffer from dysentery.
• The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the most terrible.
• “Niggardliness” means stinginess or unwilling to spend money or resources.  Despite its spelling, it has no relation to the racial slur similarly spelled.

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Overall, very good read.  Depending on how your mind is, this book will either give you a greater understanding of war, or help you embrace the full effect of just how dangerous a war is.  Too often in current culture, death is seen a more of an embraceable and celebrated thing, but until it hits us personally, we never truly feel the full effect of it.  This book will give some knowledge, and others remorse, and potentially disturbed feelings.  Still recommended for that purpose alone.

Highly Recommended.

On to Book #147: Sackhead: The Definitive Retrospective on Friday the 13th Part 2 by R.G. Henning.

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Need to catch up?  See previous blog post: BB Wolfe and the Three LPs.