All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque drew on his own service in the German army to write what remains the defining novel of the First World War. Paul Baumer and his schoolmates enlist as teenagers, urged on by a patriotic teacher, only to discover the gap between the glory they were promised and the mud, gas, and slaughter of the trenches. Told in Paul’s flat, unflinching voice, the book follows the men through bombardments, brief leaves home, and the slow erosion of everyone they once were. Remarque refuses heroics; his subject is a generation destroyed by war even when it survives the fighting. Banned and burned in Nazi Germany, it became one of the most widely read antiwar novels ever written. This English translation is free to read as a PDF and EPUB.