Boys march to the front with their schoolmaster's patriotic rhetoric still ringing in their ears, and within weeks the rhetoric is indistinguishable from the mud. Erich Maria Remarque, who had been wounded five times by the age of eighteen, published this novel in 1929, and it was burned by the Nazis four years later, which is a kind of review. Paul Bäumer narrates with a plainness that is itself a moral stance: no glory, no crescendo, only the steady subtraction of everything that once made life recognizable. Boots are inherited from the dying. Butterflies drift over trenches. The novel's final sentence, reporting a death on a day so calm the dispatches read "all quiet," remains among the most quietly annihilating lines in modern fiction.