All Quiet on the Western Front showed me what it was really like to be in war. While reading All Quiet on the Western Front, it challenged me understand what it meant to be at war with another country/countries. It showed me what it meant to be a soldier, to fight in battle and risk the possibility of dying in any horrific way imaginable: poisons gas, getting mowed down by machine guns, getting bombed, getting stabbed—by either a knife or debris of something bombed, or even getting buried alive. Being in war is a true sacrifice for your country, but you build life-long friendships through the common, and constant struggle of survival. While reading All Quiet on the Western Front, it challenged me understand what it meant to be at war with another country/countries. It showed me what it meant to be a soldier, to fight in battle and risk the possibility of dying in any horrific way imaginable: poisons gas, getting mowed down by machine guns, getting bombed, getting stabbed—by either a knife or debris of something bombed, or even getting buried alive. Being in war is a true sacrifice for your country, but you build life-long friendships through the common, and constant struggle of survival. While continuing through the book, it became progressively worse for our main characters and far more sad. As the reader, we experience Paul and Germany slowly being drawn into submission, through extensive means of violence and loss. We hear of new recruits being thrown into battle without proper training, just to be killed all the same and this process would further repeat itself until the country stood no chance. At the beginning of the book, I couldn’t follow the storyline at all, and was frustrated beyond belief; however, I stuck with the book (because I literally had to) and I found that this book holds a lot of meaning, emotion, and weight to it. I’ve heard many things of war before but nothing to the extent of this; I loved it.