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The grave that they dug him had flowers,
Gathered on the hillside in soft summer colors,
And the brown earth bleached white at the edge of his gravestone,
He’s gone.
But eternity knows him, and it knows what we’ve done.
-Don McLean

World War I, the war to end all wars, though of course it didn’t. It was just “The Great War�� until humanity decided to do it again and could begin to give them numbers. Lest we ever forget, however, there are men fighting in those trenches, surviving those brutalities, and this book is the story of one of them, a twenty-year old German boy, who loses his innocence and boyhood in the midst of falling bombs and gas cannisters.

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

Remarque captures not only the active moments of the war, but the lulls between, the times when thoughts about both what you are enduring and what you have lost can drive you crazy.

Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s gave; it falls in our hearts.

And, he tells us what saves a man at a time like this. What he fights for, in fact. What keeps him from giving up the fight and sinking into the pit to die.

At once a warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall 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.

This book might have been oppressive, there are certainly parts of it that will freeze your soul, but it wasn’t, because there is so much of humanity and love and camaraderie here, that you can see beyond the horror and say to yourself, “yes, the human race is responsible for this travesty, but there is hope for the human race in the person of these individual men.��

I have heard it said that this is the definitive novel on World War I, and I agree. It captures every human emotion that war brings with it and you feel, as much as understand, what it is to be at war, to witness the deaths of so many, to look into the eyes of a man you have killed for no reason that you can understand, to question what you are doing there in the first place but to go on nonetheless. The book was banned in Germany and the author was ousted from the country shortly before World War II. I can certainly see why--who would march proudly to a senseless and greedy war with you after reading this account? The first thing to go must be the truth.

I could not help thinking of the words of Thomas Hardy’s The Man He Killed:

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

And the impossibility that even after this, men forget and rush to war.