All Quiet on the Western Front

A friend introduced me to All Quiet on the Western Front while we were still at school. “I don’t like war books,” I said. “You’ll like this,” he assured me. My friend was right.

My dislike of war literature is because of the general focus on battles and equipment at the expense of real story telling. I would slog through these books, much like the soldiers slogging through the mud, wondering what it was all about. Remarque’s book was different. Though it is set during the First World War, and though it concerns the trials of a group of German soldiers (I grew up in Australia), I was able to identify with the main character, Paul Bäumer, and the other soldiers in his unit and so could transport myself from suburban Perth to the mud and shell-fire of the Western Front...

The whole article (also with lyrics of and a task for the anti-war song "No Man's Land"): All Quiet on the Western Front (pdf)