For me, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front is
one of the most evocative and powerful pieces of literature on the Great War. The book tells the story of a tough
young German soldier in the Great War with no evident pity for the enemy. But
glimpses of sympathy break through when the soldier is home on leave and he
starts to think the enemy is not all that bad after all. This crack in his
psychological armour affects him when he returns to the front. Remarque later
said he wrote the book ‘simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though
they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war’.
The WW1 poet Wilfred Owen (left) captured the oppressing effect war can have on
the mind in his poetry. Owen suffered shell shock fighting in the Battle of the
Somme and the nightmares that he experienced afterwards had a major influence
in his writing. In his poem Strange Meeting he describes how a soldier goes to
the underworld to escape the hell of the battlefield where he meets the enemy
soldier he killed the day before. Wilfred Owen was sadly killed in action a
week before the war ended.
There are many more writers who have accurately depicted the horrors and
reality of war through literature but these two are the top of my list.