All Quiet on the Western Front' is a Powerful Anti-War Novel. Identify Some of the Features Which Give it Impact

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All Quiet on the Western Front’ is a Powerful Anti-War Novel.  Identify Some of the Features Which Give it Impact

‘This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.  It will simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by war.  This is the preface from the novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, written by Erich Maria Remarque.  This summarises the novel and gives the reader an idea of what the writer is attempting to do.  Anyone who went into the war came out mentally or physically scarred for life. 

This essay is attempting to identify some of the features which give the novel such a powerful impact.  There are a number of different areas which will be explored throughout this essay.  These include the horrors, comforts and the writer style.  This novel is about German men who fought in the war.  A group of five friends, Baumer, Kropp, Muller, Leer and Kemmerich left school and joined the army.  They travelled to the front line where they met more comrades, such as Tjaden, Westhus, Detering and Katczinsky.  The novel is a story of their lives during the war.  They experience many disasters and tragedies along the way, and many of them die along the way.  They grow closer together and become almost like brothers. 

One of the main aspects of the novel that gives impact is the horrors of the war.  War is a horrendous thing for anyone to have to go through.  It was extremely frightening for anyone who experienced it.  There were a huge number of deaths and horrific injuries.  Of the five initial friends, Kemmerich was the first to die:

‘We are by Kemmerich’s bed.  He is dead.  The face is still wet from the tears.  The eyes are half open and yellow like old horn buttons.’  During one bombardment horses got hit, making Detering distressed.  Sensuous language and vivid description is used to intensify the horror of this situation:

‘It’s unendurable.  It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.’  This situation is exaggerated and is put on a large scale, which intensifies the horror and makes the reader imagine what an awful thing war was.  Kropp and Baumer get caught in the open during a bombardment.  Although hit and injured, both have to run to avoid getting hit again:

‘The shot is just a little above his knee.  Then I take a look at myself.  My trousers are bloody and my arm, too.’

The conditions of the war were awful.  There was hardly any food and bread was the main diet:

‘We pull our belts tighter and chew every mouthful three times as long.  Still the food does not last out; we are damnably hungry.  I take out a scrap of bread eat the white and put the crust back in my knapsack; from time to time I nibble at it.’  This quote illustrates how bad the situation was during the war.  The soldiers were fed barely enough for survival.  It was hard to fight with so little energy.    The water was in short supply, and was often needed to cool down the guns, which meant the soldiers had to sacrifice their own water to help the fight for survival.  Lice were another major problem during the war.  They got in to the soldiers’ hair:

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‘Killing each separate louse is a tedious business when a man has hundreds.  The little beasts are hard and the everlasting cracking with one’s fingernails very soon becomes wearisome.’  Lice are not a major problem compared to a war, but are annoying to the soldiers, so they devise a method to kill them off:

‘So Tjaden has rigged up the lid of the boot-polish tin with a piece of wire over the lighted stump of a candle.  The lice are simply thrown into this little pan.  Crack! and they’re done for.’  Rats were a major problem within the living quarters.  ...

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