All Quiet on the Western Front     by Erich Maria Remarque, Translated by A W Wheen Original title: Im Westen nichts Neues Original language: German Published by Ballantine Books, Inc. Pub. Date: 1976 Format: Mass Market Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.84 x 7.02 x 4.08 ISBN: 0449213943 List Price: $6.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $6.99 Published by PUTNAM Pub. Date: 1980 Format: 192 pages Not available for ordering Published by FOLIO SOCIETY Pub. Date: 1966 Format: Hardcover, 184 pages Not available for ordering Published by Chivers Large Print Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Hardcover, 200 pages Not available for ordering Published by Mayflower Pub. Date: 1968 Format: Paperback, 192 pages Not available for ordering Published by Methuen Educational Pub. Date: 1984 Format: Paperback Not available for ordering Published by Pan Pub. Date: 1987 Format: Paperback, 192 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Heinemann Educational Pub. Date: 1970 Format: 248 pages Not available for ordering Published by Vintage Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback, 216 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Vintage Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Cape Pub. Date: 1994 Format: Hardcover, 216 pages List Price: £14.99 Not available for ordering

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Remarque’s most famous work is one of the bestselling German books of all time and one of the best-known anti-war novels ever. Written in 1928, it provides an impression of World War One from the point of view of the ordinary soldier. The author drew on some of his own experiences, but the work is by no means autobiographical.

The book is (mostly) a first-person narrative by the twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer, who joins up with all his grammar-school class, bullied emotionally into doing so by their teacher. Bäumer’s immediate group includes some schoolfellows, some ordinary workers, and Katczinsky, an older man, whose skills at ‘requisitioning’ are much valued. The group goes through basic training under a martinet postman-turned-drill-sergeant (whom they eventually ambush and beat up), and then they go to the front.

The style varies as we see military action through Bäumer’s eyes, hear the different soldiers speaking and become aware of the narrator’s private thoughts as he tries to cope with it all. There is violent death and horror as the men come under heavy shelling in a recently dug military cemetery (even the dead cannot sleep for long); we hear the scream of horses and the cry of a wounded man who cannot be found in no-man’s-land; just as unbearable are the hours of waiting in the trenches for the fury to begin.

Bäumer goes through a whole range of situations, such as a visit to some French girls where the soldiers buy a night’s love in exchange for food. At home on leave, he realises that the war has changed him completely, and guarding Russian prisoners makes him aware of their humanity. When he returns to the front he stabs a French soldier who lands in the same shell-hole. After a brief respite guarding food supplies, he is wounded and sent to a military hospital.

The war is lost, not because Bäumer and the others were bad soldiers, but because the allies could bring in fresh supplies and American troops. Back at the front in late 1918, with all his friends dead, Bäumer comes to terms with the fact that he just has to carry on, but he is killed a week or so before the armistice. A new voice at the end tells us that on the day he was killed the despatches said there was ‘nothing new to report’.

The war experiences of the ordinary soldier are in the foreground, and we hear these (mostly young) men trying and failing to understand what is going on, resorting to meaningless clichés like ‘war is war’. The book starts in 1917 after a battle (other things are seen in flashback), in which half of Bäumer’s company has been killed, and next time only thirty-two men come back. Gradually all the group are killed. But although Bäumer comes near to despair, the spark of life in him is inextinguishable, and his death is ironic.

The book spoke to the ‘Lost Generation’ — the young and uncomprehending majority of all soldiers — but it also makes clear that the much-vaunted camaraderie was also a superficial solidarity of the condemned. There is action, but no heroics or exciting exploits; the men are victims of a machine that rolls over them like tanks, and the message is that war is the real enemy.

‘There are rumours of an offensive. We go up to the front two days earlier than usual. On the way we pass a shelled schoolhouse. Stacked up against its longer side is a high double wall of yellow, unpolished, brand-new coffins. They still smell of resin, and pine, and the forest. There are at least a hundred.

«That’s a good preparation for the offensive, says Müller astonished.

«They’re for us,» growls Detering.

«Don’t talk rot,» says Kat to him angrily.

«You’ll be thankful if you get so much as a coffin,» grins Tjaden, «they’ll slip you a waterproof sheet for your old Aunt Sally of a carcase.»

The others jest too, unpleasant jests, but what else can a man do? — The coffins are really for us. The organisation surpasses itself in that kind of thing [...]

The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.

It is this Chance that makes us indifferent, A few months ago I was sitting in a dug-out playing skat; after a while I stood up and went to visit some friends in another dug-out. On my return nothing more was to be seen of the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back to the second and arrived just in time to lend a hand digging it out. In the interval it had been buried.

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour’s bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.’ p69-67 (from new translation by Brian Murdoch, Vintage)