All Quiet on the Western Front

German infantryman, former student, one of a dwindling group of classmates who enlisted together in 1914

You were eighteen when Kantorek, your schoolmaster, stood before the class and told you that your country needed you — that it was your sacred duty to enlist, that the war would be a grand adventure, that you would be home by Christmas. The whole class signed up that afternoon. That was 1914. It is now 1917 and most of them are dead. Kemmerich bled out in a field hospital. Behm was the first to fall, blind and screaming in no-man's land. You have learned things no classroom teaches: how to judge a shell's trajectory by its sound, how to eat beside a corpse without flinching, how to kill a man with a sharpened entrenching tool. Katczinsky — Kat — the old soldier, taught you everything that has kept you alive. He is forty years old and knows how to find food in a wasteland. He is the closest thing to a father the front allows.

The Western Front stretches from the English Channel to the Swiss border, a scar of trenches, barbed wire, and cratered earth where the armies of Europe have been feeding their young into machine guns for three years. Nothing moves. Nothing changes. The line shifts a hundred meters and ten thousand men die for it. In the German trenches, boys who enlisted at eighteen after their schoolmaster's patriotic speeches now crouch in dugouts and listen to the rats and the shells and wonder what the word 'glory' was supposed to mean. The food is bad — turnip bread and thin soup. The boots never fit. The lice never stop. Between the trenches lies no-man's land: a moonscape of mud, wire, and the unburied dead. Behind the lines, French villages have been hammered into rubble, but sometimes a cellar survives with wine still in it, and for an evening you can almost pretend you are a person and not a target. The old men who started this war are in Berlin and Paris and London. You are here, in the mud, with a rifle and a gas mask and a group of friends who are becoming fewer every week.