In All Quiet on the Western Front, an anti-war novel, Paul, the narrator, and his friends are twenty years old and younger, yet they have been through and experienced more than most grown men. Paul refers to himself and others his age as lost because their youth has been taken away from them. They are fighting in a war that makes no sense to them, and are witnessing massive human suffering at a time when they should be enjoying the carefree innocence of youth. Paul expresses this loss of innocence with a bitter tone: "We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk." Being soldiers in the war has opened their eyes to so many atrocities that nobody should ever have to experience. They witness overwhelming amounts of killing, pain, fear, and sadness. Paul says, "We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial-I believe that we are lost." The language that they have acquired is crude, impolite, and that of the uneducated. They say they are 'forlorn like children' because they have been torn away from one life and thrown into another, which is that of one who is older.
             Before the war, Paul and his friends went to school like all children. Now, as soldiers, they see that war could be the only life they will ever know; they do not see the point in learning about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Paul expresses this disillusionment when he says, "We remember mighty little of all that rubbish. Anyway, it has never been the slightest use to us. At school nobody ever taught us to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs." All these things that they were taught in school are not helping them in the war. Out on the battlefield, what is the point of knowing "...