Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front

Imagine a world where trees are lying everywhere; there are craters in the earth as larges as busses and corpses of men lying everywhere. This is a world the past generation experienced. This is World War I. Remarque portrays the technological and military innovations in All Quiet on the Western Front as horrific, in the ways of creating mass casualties, causing psychological problems in the soldiers, and destroying nature. The technological and military innovations that remarque portrays creates mass casualties. In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul’s unit gets bombarded by the allies until there was “thirty-two” left (Remarque 118). The cannons and artillery had completely riddled Pauls unit until there was thirty-two of the

The cannon barrage tears apart anything in it’s path. The bombs destroy France and all of its beauty. The new cannons of the war and the trenches built by the soldiers uproot the French countryside. The beautiful French forests are being destroyed by the cannons. In the long run the entirety of France is destroyed. For example, after WWI, the Verdun battlefield was abandoned and the remnants of war remained strewn everywhere. “Large expanses of agricultural land were never re ploughed due to the tens of millions of craters and unexploded shells lying on or just beneath the surface” (Hupy 3). Many of the villages that once dotted the region were never rebuilt. Eventually the barren, cratered surface became covered with a thick mass of shrubby vegetation. French officials believed the area was a wasteland and abandoned any plans for restoration (Hupy 3). This shows how destructive the war and its tools are. The war destroys Verdun so much the French give up trying to use it in the future. In the book the horses that are used for war are killed and have to suffer their wounds because the soldiers that were not harmed have to take care of the wounded soldiers first. This shows the savagery of the weapons when used on innocent animals such as these