The novel, made famous by a film, is a war diary. Set during the First World War, it recounts the story of a group of German twenty-year-olds: “the iron youth,” as their schoolmasters called them. Everything is confused; memories of their previous lives are

mute visions, (...) an immense, disconsolate melancholy. (..) As long as we were in the barracks they awakened in us a wild and rebellious longing. (...) But here in the trenches that world is lost. The memory rises no more; we are dead, and it appears far away on the horizon like a ghost, like an enigmatic reflection that torments us and that we fear and that we love without hope. (...) And even if it were restored to us, this landscape of our youth, we would no longer really know what to do with it

. What Paul, the first-person narrator, recounts is a descent into hell; and he does so without rhetoric, victimhood, or self-indulgence.

Our thoughts are like soft clay molded by the shifting fortunes of the days; they are good when we are at peace, dead when we find ourselves under fire. Churned-up ground, within us and without us

. The book retraces the various facets of military life amid the great slaughter that was the First World War: the agony of a comrade-in-arms (

This is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old; he does not want to die, Do not let him die!

), whose fine boots are appropriated while he is on his deathbed; the harsh and oppressive discipline of the barracks, the infantryman's petty revenges against the obtuse and malicious non-commissioned officer; the vital importance of rations, the scrounging and stealing to supplement meager food; visits to young prostitutes while dreaming that they are the girls from the propaganda posters; the atmosphere of the field hospital, where limbs are amputated amid the wretches' shrieks, and men can hardly wait for a dying comrade to vacate a bed; leave back home, made grating by having to endure the warmongering speeches of the “bourgeoisie”; friendship, a bond strong enough to make the harshness of a soldier’s life bearable, yet so fragile because companions die so easily; and, finally, the trenches. Anyone expecting an epic tone, a sort of Iliad, will be disappointed. The fighting is, in truth, pure butchery: bodies riddled with bullets and pulverized by shells, the death rattles of the wounded with disemboweled bellies, blood and corpses everywhere, even the screams of dying horses; all that matters to the infantryman is survival.

We have become dangerous beasts, we no longer fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. (...) We rave with rage, we are no longer bound helplessly to the scaffold, we can destroy, kill in our turn, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to avenge ourselves

The book is an indictment of war, not only because it is absurd and cruel, but because it transforms men, stripping them of their humanity:

this life has reduced us to barely thinking animals, (...) it has kneaded us with insensibility, to make us withstand the horror that would crush us; (...) it has given us the indifference of savages so that we may endure, despite everything, every moment of reality. (...) Thus we lead a closed, hard existence, entirely on the surface

There is no plot in the strict sense; the characters act like people living “empirically,” day by day, devoid of apparent feelings, which would in any case be useless to show. The narrative is sustained by an essential, stripped-down prose made of short, almost frantic sentences capable of driving the story forward at a relentless pace. At times, moments of calm supervene, such as life in the barracks or leave at home (and here the author's stylistic weakness emerges); yet this is momentary: the images of the great slaughter return, evocative of that cruel death which is war; despair overwhelms us, and we realize that life is a wretched semblance. There are only stumps of life:

red poppies on the meadows around our billets, glossy insects on blades of grass, warm evenings in the cool, half-dark rooms, black and mysterious trees in the twilight, stars and the flowing of waters, dreams and long sleep

Why read it? It reminds us of what war truly is.

All Quiet on the Western Front