"ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT" ESSAY.
"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 stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." (foreword). This quote explains the whole meaning of the book "All Quiet on the Western Front". It tries to convey the point that war is complicated. It not only affects you physically, but also psychologically. So those who survived physically, not always survived mentally. Many people of Paul's generation were mentally injured from the terrifying experience's of war. Paul's descriptions of the battlefield and the other aspects of war accurately portray how other people of Paul's generation viewed the war.
Paul's opinion, that war has ruined the survivors almost as much as the people who died, is a very reasonable opinion. His negative point of view can be rationalized from many of the events that took place as he endured the war. As Paul entered the war, the book described him as a sensitive and compassionate young teenager. But the war stripped all that away from him. "We were 18 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 war." (page 88). This quote by Paul expresses the anger and sorrow he has for what he and his comrades have done. They were in their prime, ready to show the world what they were made of. But instead they chose to sidestep that and enlist in the war. A choice unfortunately that cost them their lives.
The war not only took their best years from them, the years that a teenager grows into the man that he will be for the rest of his life, it also molded them into adults with negative results.
