In the late 1920s, a spate of novels and memoirs fundamentally challenged the prevailing view about the First World War. They emphasised the futility of the conflict, the endless sacrifice, and the comradeship of the men in the trenches that often isolated them from civilians back home. This view has come to be the dominating interpretation of the Great War, highlighting the horrors of trench life, telling of a troglodyte existence amidst the mud and barbed wire.
In Britain, there was Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), along with many others. In Germany, Erich Maria Remarque captured this same mood in 1929 with Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) and his book became an international bestseller. By the end of 1930 it had sold 2.5 million copies in more than 20 countries, including a million copies in Germany alone.
The book tells of a group of young German schoolboys who rush to enlist in 1914, excited by the prospect of fighting for the Fatherland. It shows their gradual transition from young idealists to embittered and disillusioned soldiers, and paints a truly gruesome picture of the horrors of trench life and the pointlessness of endless attacks that never achieve anything but the death of so many young men.
The Battlefields of England