Analysis Of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

A Lifetime of Sacrifice
Nine million soldiers, dead. Twenty one million soldiers injured. The soldiers in World War I knew that ultimately deaths and injuries would be a result of the war, but they never could have guessed the extent of this war’s damage or the challenges they would face that would change them forever. WWI began in 1914, triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, after years of global political tension. Though the war began between Austria and Serbia, an entanglement of political alliances soon drew most of the major world powers into the conflict‒ thus creating the first World War. Along with its global scale, World War I introduced the use of industrial technology that revolutionized the way war

It is in these conditions that Erich Maria Remarque’s, All Quiet on the Western Front‒ a novel about a young German soldier’s experience in World War I‒ takes place. In All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque accurately depicts the trench conditions of World War I and the psychological affects the war has on soldiers in order to call attention to how war cheats young soldiers of their adolescence and causes permanent physical and emotional damage.
Firstly, Remarque truthfully portrays the trench conditions in World War I to bring awareness to the traumas soldiers experienced due to the dangers and discomforts of trench life and how this continues to affect them after the war. Trench warfare was a combat tactic used in World War I in which opposing troops fought from dug up ditches, or trenches, that faced each other with an empty expanse

In the shelter of the trenches, effective attacks could not be made, because, while trenches were beneficial defensively, they caused weak offensive tactics. The only way to break enemy lines was to charge to the enemy’s trench, however this was exceptionally difficult to do because soldiers were vulnerable to machine gun fire when crossing the open space between trenches. This situation slowed down the war process, causing soldiers to spends years in the filthy, cramped, and dangerous trenches of World War I. A soldier of such, the novel’s main character, Paul, narrates his ordeals as a German soldier. Among other things, Paul discusses the inconvenience of lice, arguably one of the “worst things in the war”(“Veterans of the Great War”), when saying that, “killing each separate louse is a tedious business when a man has hundreds”(Remarque 75). Paul explains how he and his fellow soldiers try to get rid of the lice by throwing them into the lid of a boot-polish tin that serves as a makeshift pan with a candle lit underneath. This description accurately recreates soldiers’ hopeless attempts to kill lice for which World War 1 veteran, Albert Marshall, explains that “You could burn [lice], run them along your shirt