Paul's Comrades In The War example essay topic

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque, is an anti-war novel from the opening chapters. Many people did not want to believe his novel represented the truth about World War I. In many ways, people were like Paul's schoolmaster, Kantorek, and they wanted to cling to classical, romantic notions of war. However, Remarque wrote his novel specifically to shatter those idealistic illusions. The young engage men who enlisted in the army on both sides often never recovered from their horrific experiences. They returned home with shattered minds and shattered bodies to an impoverished, ravaged civilian population that often regarded them as unpleasant reminders of a war they wanted to forget. Many civilians were unable to believe that the soldiers suffered horrors far greater than what they had suffered.

Many veterans could not talk about their experiences because they were unspeakable. They were the victims, but they were also the killers. What had been done to them, they had done to others as well. There are many reasons that the generation of men who entered their young adulthood during the war is called "the lost generation. ' The Great War seemed utterly senseless. Countries slid unknowingly into a conflict they thought would end quickly.

They thought the conflict would follow the classical concept of warfare. They were utterly wrong. There was a strict disjunction between the romance of fighting for honor and the nasty, unbelievable wholesale butchery that actually happened. Hundreds and thousands of men died to win a few yards of land only to lose it again in another battle. Once the death toll neared unbelievable proportions, the war continued because civilians and soldiers demanded some justification for the slaughter and the suffering.

The stalemate lasted over four years. It is difficult to estimate the scale of The Great War's casualties. Many of the dead were never buried in marked graves. They lay and rotted in the trenches or in the No Man's Land between the trenches.

Turning off their emotions and becoming violent killing beasts was the only way that these men survived the brutality of the war. Unlike earlier generations, Paul's generation can never again hope to find comfort and inspiration in the hollow rhetoric of politicians and generals. The war has shattered their illusions, they have completely lost their emotions, and they will never regain them. Their innocence is gone and only an aimless skepticism is left to fill the void.

Most of Paul's comrades in the war, along with himself, did not volunteer because they wanted to, they joined the cause because they felt obligated to help and were often times pressured into joining. Paul's schoolmaster, Kantorek, was one of the people that pushed a young generation of men into an environment that they knew nothing about, nor did he, himself. It was not schoolmasters and other influential people that pushed these boys to enlist it was their own parents, many times. The people that the boys trusted and looked up to most were the ones who in away let them down. There was nothing that could have prepared them for the atrocities that they faced every day of the war. So many lives were lost, Paul's comrades are heroically taken down one by one until the very strings that held them together and kept the men sane were completely gone.

Their comrades became their families because only they could understand and relate to what each one was experiencing, they were victims, but they were also, heartless killers. Paul explains this inhuman side of him and his comrades when he says, We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what we know of men is thus moment when Death is hunting us down Paul's generation has no other way to deal with their actions other than to shut off their emotions and feel no remorse. The problem with shutting off their emotions is once they are shut off they can never regain them. Things that once moved them or touched them are now just a hollow past that is cloudy and hard to recognize, their happy, carefree pasts seem like dreams.

Paul realizes how much he has changed and that his emotions are non-existent when he goes home on leave. He feels out of place at his own home and does not know how to react to people, they do not understand, only his comrades know. His collection of books that use to mean so much and touch him are in Paul's words, Words, Words, Words they do not reach me. He says that he is a soldier and he must cling to that. Paul also says that, Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me, they are mere shadows and memories. The war is what caused these wonderful memories of Paul's to turn into something that is no longer really part of him, he is separated from his past life.

As he would have been separated in his future life had he survived the war. Another instance that shows the soldiers loss of emotions is when Paul kills the Frenchman that falls into the shell hole that he is hiding in. On instinct, Paul stabs the man, he does not stab the man because he wants to, he stabs him because that is what he is supposed to do. As the man lays there slowly dying, Paul begins to regret and mourn for a man who is supposed to be his enemy, when in truth he is just like Paul. Paul shows what little human emotions he has left by taking care of the man until he dies.

Even after he is dead, Paul still feels very responsible to the man. Around this same time is when Paul realizes that they are not fighting this war for themselves, they do not believe in it, the fight it because that is what their politicians and generals wanted them to. The empty words of the people who are supposed to comfort the country in a time of need no longer mean anything to the ones that are actually fighting the war. The men in the war and the bystanders of the war have completely different views as to what is going on, no one really understands the other one's problems.

What was left of Paul's generation at the end of the war had a very hard time fitting back into the society that they once belonged to. They could no longer find comfort in the words of their countries leaders. They could no longer relate to the world around them. They also had no clue as how to relate to people emotionally and physically. In the war, they would have never survived if they had not been able to separate themselves from what they were doing and they will never be able to regain that part of them.