Under conditions of non stop exposure to the horrors of trench warfare, soldiers began to break down. Confined and rendered helpless, subjected to constant threat of death, and forced to witness the mutilation and deaths of their comrades many young soldiers experienced a total destruction of the personality. In All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque shows how an entire generation of men, (those who entered the war fresh from school, knowing nothing except the environment of hopeful youth) were, if not physically, then mentally destroyed by the war. .
The main character Paul Baumer is a compassionate and sensitive young man; before the war he loved his family, his books, and he even wrote poetry. He enters the war looking for adventure, ready to prove his patriotism. By the end, his experiences have left him in a hardened, emotionless, and hopeless state with no desire to continue living. Having learned to be an adult while fighting the war, Paul and his fellow classmates only know how to be soldiers. The cold, wet trenches are their homes now and they fear they will never be able to feel at home anywhere else. When Paul is given leave and returns home, he no longer feels at home in his own house. "I breathe deeply and say over to myself:- "you are at home, you are at home." But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I can not feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there is my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano - but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us" (Remarque 160). Upon his arrival Paul realizes that he has been crushed without knowing it. The civilian world is no longer his place. He is a soldier and the battlefield is his only home. "I find I do not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world" (168). In order to reconnect with his past Paul returns to his room. Here, among his mementos, the pictures and postcards on the wall, the familiar and comfortable brown leather sofa, Paul waits for something that will allow him to feel a part of his pre-enlistment world.
