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Summary Of All Quiet On The Western Front

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“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another” (Remarque 263). This quote shows how World War I affected soldiers in more ways than we could ever realize. Throughout “All Quiet on the Western Front,” Paul, a German soldier on the front line, explains the how the war changed him. The book also explains the settings and conditions of the war during this time. Remarque explains the weapons and strategies used during WWI in good detail. “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 87-88). When George and his classmates were in school, their schoolmaster, Kantorek, pushed them to join the war, as their patriotic duty. They began the war as nineteen year olds, soon they were fighting and there was no longer any love of life, everything was the war. For these young soldiers all they know is the war, unlike the older soldiers that have been able to start families and truly begin their lives. “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

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