All Quiet on the Western Front Significant Quotes

In my novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, by E.M. Remarque, I have encountered three quotes that I believe hold significance to the main theme of the novel. The theme of the novel surrounds the view of young soldiers on war, and the feelings they have towards based on continous experiences. The first quote invovles a young German soldier providing a lightly taken but deeply thought alternative to war: "He proposes that a declaration of war should be kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country winds. That would be a much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting." (p41) Here the young German soldier points out the reality of war, a dispute between a few people resulting in the fighting of men who would otherwise want nothing of it. The second quote from the novel expresses how the mindset of young men is durastically altered by war: "We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." (p88) It is shown here the thought of another young German soldier looking back on his take on life before the war and how it has been distorted because of experiences in the war. The final quote deals with the words of a soldier when commiting the worst of his duties, taking the life of another"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?" (p223) This segment of the story illustrates the feelings of a young German soldier with the deepest regret for what he was trained to do. All of the above quotes explain exactly how young lives are changed forever, just to solve a problem that was started by people they do not know. The book emphasizes on how the fact that these young men are still not fully shaped that early in their lives, and are sent to war, causes them to be permanently transformed because of experiences in war.