All Quiet on the Western Front

Amazing to hear

I really sympathized with the storyteller. His story was touching and really got me into his head and heart. Not a happy book to say the least, but still wonderful

Second war book

This is the second war related book that I have read and am not regretting it. It simultaneously highlights the everyday life as well as the combat conditions of the soldiers.

I am so glad I listened to this book.

It is one of the best books I have read. the translation is also excellent.

Good book

I would have preferred to have a more germanic voice but besides that, brilliant audiobook

Not the America Translation

I bought this book to read along with, but the wording is absolutely different. If I had known I wouldn't have bought it, now I have to buy the other version.

Great and moving story

Great story for anyone interested in the life of a soldier during the great war.

Compelling

Hard to believe this brilliant literary work is written about events a century ago or so.Anyone who is thrilled by the thought of war,the glorification of war and wants to go to war,should read/listen to this beautifully narrated story.I watched the Hollywood movie on TV many years ago which was also impressive.All school children should read this book.To Tom Lawrence and the producers congratulations on such a superb presentation.

Excellent, probably best I have listened to.

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Would highly recommend. I can see why this is considered a classic.

Who was your favorite character and why?

No favourites

Have you listened to any of Tom Lawrence’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Don't miss it.

Any additional comments?

Was a bit concerned at the start with the English accent but wasn't an issue 5 minutes in.

Eternally classic

Any additional comments?

A book for every generation to read each decade... powerful prose..intense reflection..unflinching honesty..gut wrenching and life altering

This Is Where I Belong

Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front is beautiful, moving, and appalling, setting forth so clearly and cogently so many awful truths about war, patriotism, youth, maturity, human nature, love, and life. It is as apt today as it was when it was written, and despite being set in the First World War applies to any war fought before or after.

Remarque's purpose: "To give an account of a generation destroyed by the war." If not directly maiming and killing young soldiers, war--no adventure--severs their psychological connections to life, turning them into kill or be killed animals and abandoned children who are also old men. The real enemy is not the French (or any country) but death and war itself, as well, perhaps, as the "morally bankrupt" authority figures (politicians, teachers, preachers, parents, and newspapers) who should know better but who mismanage everything so as to let war happen and then brainwash or browbeat innocent young men full of life into entering the war. The truth of war, Paul says, is found in military hospitals, in which are found examples of every possible way to harm a human body, and which render pointless all human thoughts, words, and deeds.

The novel begins in medias res with the first person narrator Paul Baumer telling in present tense how he and his young-old veteran friends in Company B are ecstatic because their company of 150 men was just unexpectedly attacked and lost 70 men, so that the food and tobacco that had been ordered for 150 will now go to only 80, so they will finally get enough to eat. "Because of that, everything is new and full of life, the red poppies, the good food, the cigarettes, the summer breeze." They then visit one of their friends who is dying from an infected wound. "It's still him, but it isn't really him anymore. His image has faded, become blurred, like a photographic plate that has had too many copies made from it. Even his voice sounds like ashes." Another friend really wants to get the dying guy's boots, and this is perfectly natural. In the second chapter Paul flashbacks to how the boys were persuaded to volunteer by their schoolmaster (a man they now scorn), and how they were bullied through basic training by a sadistic drill corporal till they'd become hard and suspicious.

Through Paul, Remarque vividly depicts trench warfare: latrines, rations, and cigarettes; hunger and thirst; "corpse rats" and lice; dysentery, influenza, and typhus; barbed wire, trenches, dugouts, and craters; revolvers, rifles, machine guns, tracer bullets, bayonets, trench spades, flame throwers, trench mortars, rockets, shells, daisy cutters, shrapnel, hand grenades, and gas; observation balloons, airplanes, trucks, trains, and tanks; continuous fire, defensive fire, and curtain fire; attacks and counter-attacks back and forth across the lunar no-man's land; shattered bones, fragments of flesh, decapitations, disembowelings, torn off faces, blown off limbs, bodies blown out of uniforms and into trees, blue-faced gas corpses, and hissing and belching corpses. All of that becomes more and more hellish as the war drags on and the German supplies and troops dwindle.

Paul has a poet's mind for metaphor. Sitting in their dugout in the trenches is like "Sitting in our own grave waiting to be buried," or "as if we were sitting inside a massive echoing metal boiler that is being pounded on every side." Paul and his friends watch fountains of mud and iron rising up all around them, and mist rising up from the shell holes "like ghostly secrets." He says, "No man's land is outside us and inside us." And "Our hands are earth, our bodies mud, and our eyes puddles of rain." Paul's memories from before the war are dangerous, because to dwell in their lost quietness would render him unable to deal with the reality of the present moment at the front. "We are dead. Our memories come to haunt us. We have been consumed by the fires of reality." Here and there he utters brief lyrical and poignant descriptions: "The wind plays with our hair, and with our words and our thoughts." And "Days are like angels in blue and gold, untouchable."

The only good thing about the war (and it's a very sad good thing) is the bonding it forges between Paul and his friends, comrades in arms. At one point Paul and his mentor Kat are eating a goose they've organized, and Paul feels that "We are brothers… two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death." When he gets two weeks of leave, he is painfully uncomfortable at home, feeling no point of contact with his pre-war self or with his family members or former teachers, etc., because they have not the remotest conception of the front. When he returns to his friends at the front he thinks a devastating truth: "This is where I belong."

This is Brian Murdoch's 1994 translation, not A. W. Wheen's 1929 one. Here is a brief comparison:

Murdoch: "The front is a cage, and you have to wait nervously in it for whatever will happen to you."

Wheen: "The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen."

Tom Lawrence reads Murdoch's translation so well--his youthful, British voice, perfect clarity and pacing, and sensitive and sad manner all so appealing--that I found it fine.

People who are fascinated by vivid accounts of the horror of war, or who are interested in World War I as seen from the German point of view, or who like well-written, beautiful, awful, and sad books should read All Quiet on the Western Front.