This was excellent. Depressing as hell - as it should be, concerning the subject matter - but excellent. There was a line in the last few pages that made chills go up and down my spine. The narrator says, quite simply, "We are superfluous even to ourselves," and that is essentially what the young men sent off to die in the trenches of WW1 actually were. Expendable.

Paul, the 19 year old narrator who is encouraged to enlist with the rest of his school friends, sacrifices to a conflict none of them understand, tells a story of life at the front. It's incomprehensible and damaging in all the worst ways, as his friends all die around him, and the book ends with yet another death. I'd say the last was the most important of all, but of course it isn't. It's just more of the same, and indistinguishable from the rest. Remarque, himself a soldier in the trenches of that war, uses his experience to good effect, if such a terrible thing can be said, producing a disorienting and enormously successful sense of waste, of the distant callousness that can send these adolescents (and millions like them) into the most hideous meat-grinder imaginable. The end is not deserved, but it is almost inevitable. Reading All Quiet on the Western Front, it is hard to see it ending any other way.