Erich Maria Remarque was a German soldier during the World War and has written a record of life in the trenches ["All Quiet on the Western Front"]….

[As] the terse story marches forward we encounter the things that other war books have made known to us: the trench mud, the lice, the ineradicable rats, the tension, noise, fear, pain, hunger, horror….

On this long pilgrimage, so often ghastly and ferocious, there is more than the routine of the trenches…. Perhaps most important there is the inner drama—the fever that rises and falls in the souls of the fighters as the war goes on. To this, indeed, the whole story is shaped—its sharply etched descriptions of suffering, endurance, grim humor and climactic event….

"All Quiet on the Western Front" will give any sensitive reader a terrific impact. It is a book that strikes a succession of hard, inescapable blows. In this sense it is a work of art. For only because of its economy of design, its compactness of episode and its trenchancy of utterance has it managed to fuse the almost unmanageable minutiae of war material into a narrative that has the lean savagery of an Ibsen tragedy. It pays in loss of color and sense of greatness for this concentration of utterance, yet the price is perhaps not too big….

One could quote much and poignantly from this record. There are the passages of vulgar humor, Germanic yet universal in character….

Remarque says in a few sentences of foreword that he will "try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they have escaped its shells, were destroyed by war." This task is well performed. Never obtruding his feelings, he reveals them naturally and convincingly as they grow….

The generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us here, already had a home and a calling, now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most of us will be bewildered—the years will pass by, and in the end we shall fall into ruin.

This philosophy, rounding out the compact record, is in its permeative quality German. So, perhaps, is the thorough devotion to duty which seems to leave the soldiers incurious as to their enemies, except in prison camps. Yet the book is surprisingly un-national; it might almost have been written by a Frenchman or an American, or an English common soldier of intelligence…. It remains a gaunt, dynamic thing, lacking, I feel, something important in literary texture, speaking with remarkable directness of life-in-death. (p. 2)