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All Quiet on the Western Front: War and Its Purpose

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All Quiet on the Western Front: War and Its Purpose
"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing. That to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one."
- Agatha Christie

We as people never stop to think about war and its definition. Accroding to the dictionary, war is defined as a state of hostility, conlict, antagonism and death. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque tells the story about Paul Baumer, the narrator and protagonist of the book , a neneteen year old German soldier who fights in the front lines of Western Europle during Wold War I and describs its synical hateful environment. The autobiographical book, Night by Elie Wiesel, takes place during The Holocaust. Elie, as a young Jewish boy witnessed mass murder and loses his loved ones in the process in the hands of the Nazis while imprisoned in the most notorious death camp, Auchwithz. "I thought I was honoring my country, but I was very wrong " recalled Benjamin Mejia, a 40 year old army veteran who fought in war during Desert Storm. These descriptions of War follow its definition with high precisement and leads to the raw truth. The truth is that through its hostile nature, war negatively affects the lives of the people involved with it buth physically and mentally which they have to carry for the rest of their lives.

War and its antagonistic influence has the potential power of making its victims suffer physically. "I am operated on and vomit for two days. My bones will not grow together, so the surgeons' secretary says. It is damnable." said Paul Baumer as he was wounded as a cause of war. It must have been even worrse under the conditions soldiers in the past faced on account of not having the medical advances we have today. Antibiotics were not invented until later on in the century so soldiers back then had to suffer the enduring paing for a much longer period of time. "The pain was undefiable. It was like if someone were to stab you with a fiery pitchfork in the back," recalled Benjamin Mejia as he

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