Synopsis (credit: back cover)

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their chauvinistic schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. Their disenchantment begins during the brutal basic training and then, as they board the train to the front, they see the terrible injuries suffered on the frontline — their first glimpse of the reality of war.

On the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die List.

(Bought second-hand at CAFDA Charity Bookshop, Regent Avenue, Sea Point.)

The book forms part of my permanent collection.

I finished reading this book on the eve of the 4th birthday of my BookCrossing bookshelf. Looking back through my reading list, I notice I have read many books with war as central theme that I regarded as excellent. All Quiet on the Western Front is certainly no exception.

Many of them dealt with the horror and futility of war. In this book, the narrator is Paul Bäumer, a 19-year-old German soldier. He grew up as a creative person, someone who loved reading: a thinker. The reader experiences the notorious conditions of the Great War through his day-to-day descriptions but also from his wider observations. He paints the distorted reality of war, the unbreachable divide between the views of those who haven't experienced the front first-hand and his own reality, and the psychological impact of all this on him and his generation. No wonder the author prefaces the book with the following note: This book is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war — even those of it who survived the shelling.

The translation is generally good but does fall short in a few instances. However, it does not distract from the overall effect of the book. I'm glad I finally read Remarque's classic.

There are so many quotable passages in the book. If I have to choose one of them: The truck rolls monotonously onwards, the shouts are monotonous, the falling rain is monotonous. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead men up at the front of the truck, on the body of the little recruit with a wound that is far too big for his hip, it's falling on Kemmerich's grave, and it's falling in our hearts.