The battlefield is stained with blood. Tommies are firing, bombs are dropping, and people are dieing too. Young men are making the ultimate sacrifice, needlessly, just to defend their country. After months of death, famine, and life in the shadows, even the toughest of men and the most cheerful of men can be flipped upside down. Many soldiers had come into this war with valor and pride for their country and their livelihoods but few soldiers made it out. Many of these soldiers' values had dramatically changed during the war. Paranoia and death was as dangerous as the guns in the battlefield
Many soldiers in World War I enlisted in the Army to defend their countries and their families. The men in All Quiet on the Western Front were young and invulnerable, or so they thought. Many came in with a cheerful attitude towards life, and a loathing for death. Throughout this book, Paul changes his values and his views on life, until he is finally killed in battle. Through the book, he learns to accept death, and he acts differently to Kemmerich's and Kat's death, he changes his take on life and what happened, and he gets experienced. He becomes a veteran. As this book says, "It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who even though may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war".
In the first few chapters of this book and the last few chapters of this book, Paul loses one of his dearest friends. He reacts remarkably different to these losses. When Kemmerich is hurt, Paul tries to talk Kemmerich into believing that everything is fine and that he will be ok(page 30). He also packs up Kemmerich's things before visiting him, because "he will need them on the way back" (page 13). When Kat gets injured, Paul rushes him to an orderly and demands that he help Kat (pages 289-290). This shows that Paul takes injury and death more serious in the end of the book. After Kemmerich dies, Paul isn'...