All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of the First World War, told by Paul Bäumer, a German soldier who joined up at nineteen with his classmates at the urging of their schoolmaster, of life and death at the front and of the gulf it opens between his generation and home.

Start reading12 chapters, about 64,000 words

Famous quotes

• We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

  Chapter VIn context

  • War & Peace
  • Youth

• It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

  Chapter VIIn context

  • Luck
  • War & Peace

• A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.

  Chapter VIIIIn context

  • Enemies
  • War & Peace

• Why do they never tell us that you are just poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony⁠—. Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

  Chapter IXIn context

  • Enemies
  • War & Peace

• A hospital alone shows what war is.

  Chapter XIn context

  • Health
  • War & Peace

• He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.

  Chapter XIIIn context

  • War & Peace

Contents

1. Chapter I
2. Chapter II
3. Chapter III
4. Chapter IV
5. Chapter V
6. Chapter VI
7. Chapter VII
8. Chapter VIII
9. Chapter IX
10. Chapter X
11. Chapter XI
12. Chapter XII