All Quiet On The Western Front Effects Of War

War will take its toll on a soldier. In the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, the soldiers of Second Company come out of the war damaged in many ways which are almost unpreventable. Their bodies are hurt, their minds are full of fear and they are eventually molded to think that being surrounded death is a normal day to day thing. The soldiers relationships with people and places are destroyed their generation is lost. War leaves them alone and afraid. Some people survived the First World War physically, but nobody survived it soldierstally. Many of the soldiers are just boys who have no life experience. When they arrive at the front they see death, and when they leave the front all they now know is death.
The bodies …show more content…
They got injured, died, and experienced death and things that are not meant for the human eye to see almost every day. This causes the soldiers to not be able to reconnect with society, their families and their surroundings. The soldiers want to forget about the war (which they never will), but the civilians want to hear about it. “He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him.” Baümer is talking about his father, whom Paul is finding annoying. Baümer has become annoyed with how naïve the people back home are about the war. Nobody is able to understand the war and what soldiers like Paul have been through. Paul’s father is only interested in the stories that Paul has to tell him, and asks him questions such as whether Paul has been in hand to hand combat. Paul, wants to forget the war, and being pestered with questions that bring back awful memories separates Paul and his father. Walking around in his house, Paul doesn’t feel as he normally would, “a terrible feeling of foreignness suddenly rises up in me.” After experiencing the war, nothing is the same as what it once is, books which Paul read many times are no longer valuable to him, his own house has an eerie strangeness to it. Going from having to be on guard at any mosoldierst and living with constant anxiety and stress, to going back to a time when Paul still had his youth, his innocence, and is carefree, is a big change. The experience of war will take away Paul’s and his fellow soldier’s curiosity and aptitude for fun and learning for the rest of their lives. The soldier’s relationships with their environment and peers will never be the same after the