“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”

What an amazing but heart wrenching book. It really makes the reader think and consider what a horrible thing a war is, seen from the eyes of a young soldier who has lost the meaning of life. All he knows is war, he can’t go back because he does not know what he’ll be able to do out there, in the “normal” world, which is not filled with war and it’s atrocities. The book is filled with contemplations of life and it’s meaning, the futility of war and how the lives of young people, who have not yet experienced the world, are ruined by it.

It was really hard to read it in such moments, because the author paints the picture and conveys the pain so vividly, that you can’t help but imagine how a person would feel in such a situation, sitting in a trench and hoping that an air strike or mortar shell will avoid him, hoping that lady fortune is on his side that day and he won’t be killed by a stray bullet or shrapnel. Just imagining the helplessness of a person in such situation is hard. What could a soldier do? Duck his head and pray, that’s it. His life was in the hands of luck and he can do nothing about it. Being unable to do anything to save your life and your friends is truly horrible… Give a man a chance to live, fight for his life, and he’ll do his hardest to survive, but having no chance at all and his life decided by luck… It just breaks a man.

And then there’s another type of pain, which is caused by Paul’s contemplations about futility of war and life in general and what would he be able to do when and if he gets back home and deciding that his generation is lost, because they won’t be able to adapt to normal life. Just thinking about the fact that people of my age and younger were in that hell is really hard. Boys of 20 were already considered battle-hardened veterans, while there were even younger soldiers, who were absolutely clueless about the war and what they were supposed to do to survive…

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

As I’ve said, it’s a hard book to read but amazing and well worth it nonetheless. It’s a great anti-war book, which really shows the hardships of young soldiers fighting in the WW1.