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“War is Hell!” All Quiet on the Western Front, written by Erich Maria Remarque, is the ultimate anti-war novel. In great detail Remarque proves his theme that war is horrible, wasteful, and creates alienated people. He uses the characters’ thoughts and dialogue, as well as the description of battles, to show that there is no glory in war. During the “Great War” or World War I in Germany, he shows how a few powerful people can create a war, which destroys the lives of so many people, especially the young men and the poor. The main character, Paul Baum, is an eighteen-year-old recruit who, along with several other students, is convinced by a schoolteacher, Kantorek, to fight for the fatherland of Germany in 1916. The teacher appeals to the nationalism and patriotism of his students. In the first chapter Baum realizes that the leaders and the Kantoreks of the world write of the glories of war, while the recruits “saw the wounded and dying…. distinguished false from true” (13). Paul and his comrades have seen the horror of war in the forms of nerve gas, rats, starvation, and even having to hide under an occupied casket. Paul describes being in a graveyard when his fingers “grasp a sleeve---a dead man….The coffin lid is loose and bursts open….we toss the corpse out, it slides down to the bottom of the shell-hole” (69). In another scene, the horrible pain and suffering is shown when a young recruit is shot in the hip. A soldier asks if he shouldn’t just put the boy out of his misery, for “what he has gone through so far is nothing to what he’s in for till he dies….
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