Book Bearings
All Quiet on the Western Front
- 248 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1928
- 225 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
This is the testament of Paul Bäumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I. These young men become enthusiastic soldiers, but their world of duty, culture, and progress breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.
Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the hatred that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another... if only he can come out of the war alive.
- World War I
- Soldiers
- War & military
- Campaigns
- Military campaigns
- War stories
- Warfare
- Germany
2 What to expect
A short novel of the First World War told by a young German soldier who went to the front from school with his classmates. It shows trench warfare without heroics: shelling, hunger, fear, the loss of friends, and the feeling of being cut off from home and from any future. The prose is plain and direct, in brief episodes, and it is among the bleakest and most affecting accounts of war in fiction.
Good for readers who want: a classic anti-war novel, the First World War from the trenches, and a short, powerful read.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Erich Maria Remarque
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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