All Quiet on the Western Front

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Remarque tells what happens to a group of German teenagers during World War I. Paul Baumer is the protagonist in the novel who changes from an innocent, inexperienced young man to a hardened disillusioned soldier. It is through his narration that the reader lives through what they experienced. Chapter one introduces each character, theme, and tone for the entire novel and sets up the intent: to illustrate how a generation of men, who though they survived the war physically, were destroyed by it mentally.
At the outset, chapter one opens with the narrator, Paul Baumer, returning from the front lines of World War I. The seriousness of war is evident immediately when Baumer relates that out 150 men only eighty return. “But on the last day an astonishing number of English heavies opened up on us with high-explosives, drumming ceaselessly on our position, so that we suffered severely and came back only eighty strong” (page 2). From this p...