The dictionary defines war as "a state or period of armed hostility or active military operations", but the soldiers in Erich Maria's powerful novel Note on the First World War, All calm on the Western Front be able to say the opposite. In the preface to the novel, Remarque states: "It [the book] will simply attempt to tell the story of a generation of men who, although they were able to escape the shells, were destroyed by the war. » The soldiers begin to be completely destroyed as they continue to lose all hope, humility and any previous connection to their previous lives. The narrator, Paul Bäumer, sees and experiences events that change his life after his enlistment and from which he will never be able to regain calm. He gradually becomes exhausted and is a shell of the twenty-year-old boy he was before. Similar to Paul, each soldier of the younger generation slowly begins to be devastated from within as they begin to lose control of the reality they once knew. The war is brutal, violent and merciless, resulting in the physical destruction of soldiers. . Each time Paul is at the front, he sees another of his comrades fall injured or dead under the munitions of the Allied forces. You get used to seeing your friends lying down with a missing limb or bleeding profusely from the hip. Franz Kemmerich, Paul's best friend and classmate who had enlisted with him, is shot in the hip and has to have his leg amputated. When Paul and the rest of the soldiers in their company visit him, they notice a change in his behavior and appearance. Paul describes: “On his face there are already the tense lines that we know so well, we have seen them hundreds of times now. They are not so much lines as marks. Under the ski... in the middle of a paper...... solved in it. When we think about war and how soldiers can be affected by it, most people only think about the physical repercussions they would experience. Few people realize the emotional and psychological consequences that war also has for them. A soldier is not going to suffer one of these forms of destruction without it being inevitably followed by the other two. Note states in the preface that the book will attempt to chronicle the generation of young men who fought for Germany in World War I and how they may have been affected. His account offers an honest perspective of the war that many would never have experienced before. As one can see how the soldiers are destroyed on so many levels, they might be able to truly respect what they go through to defend their country and might gain a new perspective on the German forces of so long ago..