The prologue in the movie starts with a statement that says that this is a story of a “generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war…” The movie opens “at peace” with the camera focusing into a school window with a German schoolmaster telling his young students of the honour of being part of the war. He states,
To be foremost in battle is a virtue not to be despised. I believe it will be a quick war. There will be few losses. But if losses there must be, then let us remember the Latin phrase which must have come to the lips of many a Roman when he stood in battle in a foreign land:...Sweet and fitting it is to die for the Fatherland...Now our country calls. The Fatherland needs leaders. Personal ambition must be thrown aside in the one great sacrifice for our country. Here is a glorious beginning to your lives. The field of honour calls you.
Kantorek, the teacher, spoke not from wisdom or experience but from lofty arrogance and power for their country. The young boys enlist into war enthusiastically talking about the glory of fighting for ones country. Soon the boys find themselves in the true reality of war- it is nothing more than death. "The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts." Baumer and his classmates knew nothing except the environment of hopeful youth and they came to a premature maturity with the war. The film portrays the lives of the soldiers in the trenches in the Great War who found no glory on the battlefield, meeting only death and disillusionment. The soldiers enter the war not even knowing what the reason for war is. This is evident when the soldiers discuss what they think the nature of war is. One of the soldiers compares war to a "fever", he says: "Nobody wants it in particular. And then all at once, here it is. We didn't want it. The English didn't want it. And here we are fighting." The soldiers enlist into war with heroic thoughts on their mind not realizing that they are placing themselves face to face with death. They did not know what positions they were placing themselves in. This is evident on the reactions of the soldiers to their friends and fellow soldier’s deaths during the war. For example, in an occasion when a soldier tries to retrieve his friend from dieing, Stanislaus Katczkinsky, the leader of Baumer’s group, stuns him by explaining to him that it is foolish of him to try and retrieve a dead man.
Soldier: (shocked) Dead. He's dead.
Katczinsky: Why did you risk your life bringing him in?
Soldier: But it's Behm, my friend.
Katczinsky: (admonishing) It's a corpse, no matter whose it is. Now, don't any of ya ever do that again.
The soldiers loose their innocents and are left with only emotional and psychological torment of the war. In an inspiring battle scene in no-man's land, the camera rapidly moves across showing the French infantry charging towards the Germans. At one point, a grenade explodes in front of a charging French soldier who is approaching a barbed wire. When the dirt and smoke clears, only his hands are left gripping the wire. Paul Baumer turns and cringes in horror. The terror of death infests the minds of the soldiers and brought about horrible images of death and destruction until they broke down into pieces. "Every hour and everyday, every shell and every death cuts this thin [line of sanity], and the years waste it rapidly." Paul Baumer is one of the soldiers who had some control and stability; he is similar to the protagonist Robert Ross of Timothy Findley’s novel ‘The Wars’. The only way for soldiers to survive is to disconnect themselves from their feelings, suppressing their emotions and accepting the conditions of their lives - lives of death. Baumer and all the soldiers change when they went to war. One of the soldiers says: "We will not be able to find our way any more." They dread the end of the war almost as much as they dread wound and death. They experience the horrors of war but never the love and enjoys of life. In the outcome almost every major character is dead, epitomizing the war's devastating effect on the generation of young men who were forced to fight it.
War and death both have the same meaning: to put an end to. A parallelism can be drawn between war and death. War leads to immense numbers of death, World War 1 lead to millions of deaths approximately 7 million men. All Quiet on the Western Front was a film portraying the pointlessness and futility of war, of soldiers in the trenches in the Great of War who found no glory on the battlefield, meeting only death. Towards the end Baumer confesses his gut reactions to war, he realizes that war is all about killing and death. Baumer said:
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.
The soldiers become heroes, but not because of the ideal that the schoolmaster planted into them. They are heroes because they realized what war was actually about. In war it is a matter of killing or being killed, or of destroying so that one may live.
In All Quiet on the Western Front the horrible effects of death and destruction during the war is portrayed perfectly. Scenes of horror and disruption show the main theme of the novel, opposing death and destruction. Furthermore, the soldiers are the ones who see the true horrors of war. War is a means of death, which is what it is all about. On the whole, War is Death.