Many novels and movies portrayed and emphasized the ideas of glory, honor, adventure, and patriotic duty. Maria Remarque portrayed war, as it was actually experienced in All Quite on the Western Front. Erich M. Remarque had replaced the heroism and glory with a vision of fear, meaninglessness, and butchery. He conveys in this book the brutality of war that had completely altered the human spirits of a soldier, who in this case is Paul Baumer, a German soldier.
Remarque’s novel started out with Paul and several of his friends who have graduated from school and joined the army voluntarily after listening to the stirring patriotic speeches of their professor. They all started out believing and looking at going to war as an opportunity to show their heroism and patriotism. But after ten weeks of cruel training and the unimaginable brutality of life on the front, Paul and his friends had realized that the ideals of nationalism and patriotism for which they enlisted is not what they expected.
Paul and his friends are subjected to constant physical danger, as they can literally be blown to pieces at any moment. This intense of physical threat also serves as an unceasing attack on the nerves, forcing soldiers to survive with primal, unconscious fear during every waking moment. In addition, Paul and many other soldiers were forced to live in horrible condition of filthy, soaked ditches full of rats and decaying bodies. They frequently went without food, sleep, and medical care. Where as at night, they went on a traumatic mission to lay barbed wires at the front. Weapons pounded them and groups of living men fell dead around them, with constant fear of getting killed and seeing close friends getting killed. Gruesome events of war that played over and over again each and everyday, made Paul feel that he must become an animal in battle, trusting only his instincts to keep him alive. Paul discovered that it is a waste of time, hope and dreams of his life flying further and further away. Sometimes at night he desperately wished to recapture his innocence with a girl, but he felt that it was impossible to do.
