y an immense optimism. It was thought that public health, invention, the telegraph, the telephone, ultimately the wireless and the radio, were going to civilize human life in a way that it had never been civilized before. And, then, all of a sudden, what happens is ghastly war breaks out and spoils everything." The inventions that were supposed to improve the standards of living for humanity in fact made the war more tragic. "The age that died in 1914 was a brilliant one - so extravagant in its intellectual and aesthetic endowments that we who have come after can hardly believe in its reality." In Eric Remarque's novel "All Quite on the Western Front" one can clearly see what war had done to the people, especially to the young generation who fought it. The soldiers who fought in the Great War often lost their interest in life. The only significance in the lives of the soldiers was comradeship. Eric Remarque also mentions in his novel what was the opinion of the soldiers about the progress, "We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. ... The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." That was the mentality of the soldier of the Great War. Nothing in the world meant anything to a soldier, other than the "war". Remarque also shows in his novel how meaningless was the war for the soldier. There is a place in the novel were Paul kills a French soldier, and feels very guilty about it. It shows one more time how artificial was the cause of the war. There was no real cause why German would hate a Frenchmen and voiceovers. Erik Remarque shows that when Paul talks to a dead French soldier where he says, "Comrade, to-day you to-morrow me. But if I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down; from you,...
