[In "All Quiet on the Western Front"] a German tells in three hundred simple and vivid pages that same "truth about the war" which his fellows on the other side have already told: War is an interminable, exhausting, and nightmarish business without alleviation or purpose. The soldier is prepared by the gratuitous brutality of the training camp for the necessary brutality of the trenches, and, once he has been launched in his trade, there is no variety except in the kinds of misery.

Remarque tells his plain tale with a sort of naivete which is the result, not of too little experience, but of too much. He has given up rhetoric because it is inadequate and given up analysis because he has gone through more than can ever be analyzed. He must be content to record with a simplicity which is terrible because it could never have been arrived at except through an experience so long as to make the unspeakable commonplace….

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is the German equivalent of [Anders] Latzko, [Henri] Barbusse, and [John] Dos Passos. Inferior to none of the others in vividness or power it is, like them, not only impressive in itself but still more so when taken in conjunction with its fellows. Four men of different race, education, and temperament are thrown into the same great catastrophe. Each, victor and vanquished alike, returns to his own home and each reports, not only men and events, but moods and manners, so precisely similar that if a few words were obliterated it would be impossible to tell which was French and which was German, or Hungarian, or American. All agree in what they leave out—glory and patriotism; all agree in what they put in—suffering, and fear, and disgust. "Death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it," says Remarque, and each in his own way has said the same. Between them (and with the aid of numerous less-talented confreres) they have created a new image of war. In literature at least it can never be the same again. Brass-band versions of the old romanticism may serve the practical purposes of statesmen very well when the next occasion arises, but in art there is no pride, pomp, or circumstance left for Glorious War. Too many literate persons survived to tell their tale with a unanimity which leaves no room for doubt.