All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

One by one the boys begin to fall.

In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth, they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

To most readers of literature in English, All Quiet on the Western Front is told from an unfamiliar perspective: that of the enemy. But one thing that struck me about this book is that it could have been written from either side as the experiences are so similar. The horrors of trench warfare, losing your friends in battle, the lasting damage, the fact that the soldiers were supposed to simply slot back into society in the aftermath of the war when their entire worlds had changed – these were universal experiences of the young men fighting in Europe in the First World War, no matter which side they represented.

One scene in the book represented that shared experience especially keenly to me. The protagonist fatally wounds a man in battle and then sits with him whilst he dies. He asks his victim for forgiveness and he searches through his wallet for an address at which he can write to the man’s wife. He reflects on how similar they are: “Why don’t they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we’re all just as scared of death, and that we die the same way and feel the same pain. Forgive me, camarade, how could you be my enemy? If we threw these uniforms and weapons away you could be just as much my brother as Kat and Albert.”

Whenever I read an account of the First World War, it makes me angry that it was so mis-sold to the boys. Describing it as an honour or as “glorious” made them think they were going off on an adventure. This book shows that young German men were spun a similar tale to their British counterparts. The reality was horrific and caused many of the survivors to suffer lifelong physical and psychiatric injuries.

The fact that those who died in the First World War are still referred to (in England at least) as the “glorious dead” and having made “the ultimate sacrifice” still quite literally glorifies the war. It portrays the soldiers as gallant heroes, willing to lay down their life for their country and for the greater good, when in fact they were just ordinary boys sent off on false premises to fight a war in which they had no personal interest. Remembrance of them should, in my opinion, include remembering the tragedies not only of their deaths but also of the circumstances of their deaths and those responsible for it.