Paul Baumer is merely 19 years old when he and his classmates enlist. They may be Germany’s Iron Youth who enter the battle with high ideals and leave it disillusioned or dead. As Paul problems using the realities of the man he has become, and the inscrutable world to which he must return, he is led like a ghost of his former self into the war’s final hours. All Quiet is one of the best war novels ever, an eloquent expression from the futility, hopelessness and irreparable loss of war.