All Quiet on Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front is narrated by a young man of the age nineteen, Paul Bäumer, who fights in the German army on the French western front in World War I. Oblivious of the path he is to encounter, his journey begun when him and several of his school friends join the army voluntarily. What seemed to have been a glorious idea, fighting in the war for your country, became cruel reality as one by one, Paul sees his friends die beside him.
As we go along with the book, we see the realization that our protagonist slowly discovers of the stupidity of war. He feels remorse and confusion of killing the enemies the war had made of people with no particular grudge against one another. On one particular occasion was his account with a French soldier. Bäumer was forced to hide in a shell hole after being separated from his company. A French soldier that Paul would later know as Gérard Duval, jumped into the same shell hole. Paul stabs him impetuously. He regrets deeply for have had harmed the man. He attempts to help the dying man but with little success. The man dies a slow and painful death. He later found that the dead man he had killed had had a wife and a little girl.
All Quiet on Western Front shows the readers many things including defeat from traumatization and remorse. It shows the brutality, pain and sorrow caused by war, the inability to heal from such terrorizing memories. It is truly a powerful and influential novel with a clear anti-war statement that should be read by everyone.