All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque with translation by A.W. Wheen

It is my firm belief that any proponent of war and any person willing to declare war should first be put into the most dangerous engagement they would consign to someone else. All Quiet on the Western Front is as close as I've ever gotten to war and as close as I ever want to be to such a thing. While I have long been a pacifist, it is the men like Erich Remarque who have lived it and suffered from it who truly can demonstrate how horrible a thing it really is.   

All Quiet on the Western Front is not a book for the faint of heart. It follows a young soldier through the trenches of World War I, fighting on German side of the war. The book engages the reader from the start with vivid descriptions and a narration that brings the soldier's hopes and fears close to the reader. If you've never read All Quiet On the Western Front, I think you'll find it a hard but worthwhile read.

 I can't do the book justice with just a blog entry...here is an excerpt:  

The young recruits of course know none of these things. They get killed simply because they hardly can tell shrapnel from high-explosive, they are mown down because they are listening anxiously to the roar of the big coal-boxes falling in the rear, and miss the light, piping whistle of the low spreading daisy-cutters. They flock together like sheep instead of scattering, and even the wounded are shot down like hares by the airmen.  

Their pale turnip faces, their pitiful clenched hands, the fine courage of these poor devils, the desperate charges and attacks made by the poor brave wretches, who are so terrified that they dare not cry out, but with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs only whimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them. 

Their sharp, downy dead faces have the awful expressionlessness of dead children. 

It brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over and run and fall. A man would like to spank them, they are so stupid and to take them by the arm and lead them away from here where they have no business to be.