While away in Northumberland I read All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, in fact I read it twice, in a good, fluent 1994 translation by Brian Murdoch.
It’s not a memoir but a novel with all that means in terms of compressing and simplifying events. There’s a handful of characters, from the narrator’s schooldays, and one by one they are killed off. Scenes are cinematically vivid, like the famous artillery attack in the graveyard. Most of all, the narrator, Paul, is continually on the edge of a nervous breakdown, oppressed by the horror and the meaninglessness of war but also by his own miserable, poverty-stricken family life.
A grim, intense read.
Related links
Other blog posts about the First World War
- The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
- Lenin on The Train by Catherine Merridale (2016)
- Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)
- Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
- The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2014)
- Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)
- The Great War (BBC TV series)
- Elgar’s Great War music
- Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
- All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
- The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
- Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928)
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
- Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)
Books & Boots 