The story of Paul Baumer, the narrator from the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque, is one of the stories that have a great impact on my life. The story centers on Paul Baumer, who enlists in the German army with glowing enthusiasm. But in the course of war, he is consumed by it and in the end is “weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.”

Baumer and his classmates who enlisted into the army see the true reality of the war. They enter the war fresh from school, knowing nothing except the environment of hopeful youth and they become mature with the war, which in the end is their only home. So then they lose their innocents. In the end, everything they are taught: are not the slightest use to them because the only thing they need to know is how to survive. Along with that, they need to know how to escape the shells as well as the emotional and psychological torment of the war.

Baumer has “grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like influenza and dysentery. ” Deaths are more frequent, more varied and terrible." He has rid himself of all feelings and thoughts. His emotions are hidden deep within himself, along with the soldiers who

I have gained a great deal of insight into the Great War from this novel. Previously, I understood the diplomacy and the military strategies involved with this war, but I have now also been exposed to the physical and foremost mental anguish that the soldiers on the front experienced. I had never thought about a soldier's loss of identity when leaving behind all of the values, schooling, and family that once revolved around them. A new perspective of the battlefield was presented in which soldiers of opposite forces are in much of the same state: frightened human beings with family and loved ones at home, attempting to avoid death each day by whatever means possible; many very likely questioning the purpose of war as Paul constantly did. Many conflicts of values were presented constantly throughout the course of World War I. One of the strongest which I had not previously considered, was the fact that as children homicide is certainly presented as a terrible act, yet on the front an unseen document legalizes mass murder. As a result of this novel, I can now clearly see how the mental anguish of soldiers on the front developed.

Personally, I would lose my mind if I were suddenly drafted. It is not the morality of war, it is the pain a soldier goes through before death. By nature, I am a chicken—a major chicken. I compared the amount of pain from a paper cut with the pain from the stabbing of a knife. Or the shock one would get from getting stapled with the shock from a bullet. If a little cut on your finger hurts as so, imagine a slash from a knife. If a teeny staple can

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