One of a series of top-quality fiction for schools, this World War I novel is a German author's attempt to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war.

Little Albert Kropp; Muller who still carries his schoolbooks; Leer, with an eye for the girls and Paul Baumer missed by his sick mother—these are four classmates who have volunteered for the German army in 1914, with youthful optimism.

This is the story of their First World War—theirs and millions like them.

We read of carnage and shell-shock, but also of small comforts and jokes, tricks to get extra rations, stretches of boredom and banality.

No novel has portrayed more universally what Owen, writing of the same period, called "the pity of war".