Wounds of War
In All Quiet on the Western Front Paul witness all the horrors of war. He sees death crawling towards the wounded soldiers in the wood, hospital, and on the front. When a soldier was wounded it killed them, they lost a limb or they got sent back to the front. Another awful part of war is soldiers would get shot and stranded out in the woods. They would yell for help, but were never found. Mental wounds were another injury of war. Paul would see people go insane on the front and some soldiers got shellshock. The worst part of the war for Paul was watching all of his comrades die, and his connection with the ones he loved at home fade away. The horrors of war is clearly represented in both Battle Scars and All Quiet on the Western Front with physical wounds, mental wounds, and loss of loved ones.
In both Battle Scars and All Quiet on the Western Front the soldiers haft to go through horrific physical wounds. One of these wounds are lost of limbs. When “Kemmerich” “lost his foot” none of his comrades dared to tell him
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Paul watched his entire high school class die in war. When Albert got shot he sweared “If they take off my leg, I'll put an end to it” to Paul (Remarque,242). Paul try's his hardest to keep them together, but in the end Paul get sent off to the front knowing once he leaves Albert will end his own life. When Paul is back at the front his father figure Kat gets shot. He carries Kat to the matic and thinks “Kat is saved” (Remarque,290). But “it'll never be over, until” he “tell me it's over” (Fiasco). Paul is told by a matic “he is dead”, he tried to prove he was alive, but to Paul's dismay he found his last friend was dead (Remarque,290). Paul has lost everyone he has ever loved and then lost all hope and strength to live on. Out of physical wounds and mental wounds the loss of a loved one and loss of hope is the worst part of
"A wounded soldier? I shout to him-no answer- must be dead." The dead body has fallen out the coffin and the coffin has been unearthed because of the shelling. Even the dead and buried cannot rest in peace during this war. This just adds to the horror of the situation Paul is in.
This shows us how war can bring men together in peace. During the roasting of the goose Kat's voice brings Paul peace and reassurance. Toward the end of the book Kat is killed, and for Paul it is such a horrible loss. The only thing helping Paul survive was the brotherhood of his friends. With Kat dead that is no longer possible.
In All Quiet on the Western Front, the main character Paul goes back to his home, the people he meets still think that the Germans are winning the war. During the war, Paul takes a leave for 17 days to go back home to visit sick mother and family. While back home, the villagers come and talk to Paul about the war. They discuss what land they will take. The villagers think that
One of the best, if not the best war novels that is Erich Remarque's “All Quiet on the
Being in a war zone for years on end can have a huge toll on people and their sanity. For Paul and his comrades in the trenches facing life or death every day, their situation for many men would lead to further problems such as shell shock(PTSD). Paul points this out and explains what had got him through this within the novel, "Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training most of us would certainly have gone mad. Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us. We did not break down, but adapted ourselves; our twenty years, which made many another thing so grievous, helped us in this. But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war—comradeship."(26-27) Here
As Paul’s story progresses, one by one, he watches all of his friends die. The friendly farmer Detering is driven mad by homesickness and is caught as a deserter and convicted by marshal court. Muller is fatally shot in the stomach during a battle and dies a slow and painful death. He gifts the boots given to him by Kemmerich to Paul. Leer dies after bleeding out from a deep wound in his thigh. Eventually only Paul and Katczinsky as the last two surviving friends. However Kat receives a severe injury to his shin and Paul must carry him to safety. Paul makes it to a triage station only to discover that Kat, whom he had been carrying on his back, had been hit in the head and killed by a piece of shrapnel along the way. His final friend in the entire world was dead. Though parting from his friends was “very hard”, Paul remarks that “a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army” (Remarque 269).
All Quiet on the Western Front is a book that describes the different struggles of World War 1 from the perspective of someone who was there but may have not necessarily experienced it all. In the book, there is a man named Paul. “…Here hang bits of uniform, and somewhere else is plastered a bloody mess that was once a human limb” (208). When Paul is at home, he is having fun with friends and thinking that going to school is so difficult and then he goes to war, and he sees a person blown into pieces and watches thousands of men dying. It is a very different life.
In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, starting with the epigraph of the book, defaces the didactic tips that the war burdens Bäumer with, "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 try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war" (1). A variety of books are written about wars, aggression, and the vast majority of them are full of patriotic pathos and romantic passages. As the novel's raconteur and protagonist, Bäumer is the focal figure in All Quiet on the Western Front and fills in as the mouthpiece for Remarque's reflections about war. All through the novel, Bäumer's internal identity is stood out from the way the war drives him to act and feel. His recollections of the time before the war demonstrate that he was at one time an altogether different man from the miserable fighter who now portrays the novel. Bäumer is a caring and naive schoolboy; before the war, he adored his family and composed poetry. Witnessing the awfulness of the war and the tension it instigates, Bäumer, as different warriors, figures out how to separate his psyche from his sentiments, keeping his feelings under control with a specific end goal to save his rational soundness and survive. With his epigraph, Remarque immediately separates
All Quiet on the Western Front Essay We learn about past wars in history. We hear stories from soldiers that partake in these wars, but do we really understand what goes on out on that battlefield? We would have to see and experience it ourselves to fully grasp why soldiers come back so scarred. Not only physically but emotionally, and socially as well.
"Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die"- Herbert Hoover. The leaders who decide to start the war do not have to fight, but the people who do not want to fight, like nineteen year old Paul and his friends, are the ones who are killed and injured. In the book All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Paul changes physically and emotionally through war. Set in Germany during World War I, Paul and his friends must do the unthinkable to survive the war and it causes them to slowly lose their identity. Paul is changed by the harsh effects of the war through his dehumanization, rapid personal growth, and alienation from the rest of the world.
When he is reunited with his mother "[they] say very little," but when she finally asks him if it was "very bad out there" Paul lies. In trying to protect her by lying, Paul creates a separation between his mother and himself. As Paul sees it, the tragedies and horrors of war are not for the uninitiated. Sadly, the true nature of war further separates the two generations.
World War I was one of the deadliest wars in human history, taking the lives of millions and changing the lives of countless more. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, 19- year-old German soldier Paul Bäumer strives to survive in the Western Front of World War I. Throughout the novel, the war forces Paul to change his character into a hopeless soldier that relies on instinct to only survive in battle. Once an ambitious and compassionate young man, the horrors, and anxieties of war induces Paul to detach his inner personality from reality forces him to focus on war. As a result, Paul struggled to understand himself and could not conceive a future without war, transforming his existence into an endless suffering, destroying Paul long before the war kills him.
The novel All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is story of the fictional character Paul Baumer and his troop Troop 9 as they battle in World War I on the Western Front for Germany. This novel differs from most war novels in that it does not portray the men as valiant soldiers protecting their country. The way that the story is told strips away the romanticized view warfare and portrays the raw emotions that come with being on the front lines of a battle. As both Paul Baumer’s life and the battle progress, Paul’s values, along with those of the other soldiers, evolve until they culminate in Baumer’s own passing.
Yet another example of the brutalization and dehumanization of the soldiers caused by the war occurs during Paul’s leave. On leave, Paul decides to visit his hometown. While there, he finds it difficult to discuss the war and his experiences with anyone. Furthermore, Paul struggles to fit in at home: “I breathe deeply and say over to myself:– ‘You are at home, you are at home.’ But a sense of strangeness will not leave me; I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano – but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a
In the words of Otto Von Bismarck, “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.” Many of the preceding war novels to All Quiet on the Western Front, misrepresented or overlooked the anguish of war, in favor of more resplendent ideals such as glory, honor, or nationalism. The predominant issue of All Quiet on the Western Front is the terrible atrocities of war. The reality that is portrayed in the novel is that there was no glory or honor in this war, only a fierce barbarity that actually transformed the nature of human existence into irreparable, endless affliction, destroying the soldiers long before their deaths.