First world war, or the Great War, as everyone called it then. Fought mainly because the various imperialist chest-thumpers ruling the European super-powers got into a dick measuring contest, the war completely destroyed a whole generation of their populations. Common draftees died in vast numbers, and those who survived often did so without all intact limbs, and suffering from severe shell shock… as PTSD was called back then. The devastation of war is so complete, that no one survives, even if the soldier returns from war.
Written in first person by a young German soldier recruited straight from high-school, the story details the daily horrors: hand-to-hand combat, trench warfare, barbed wire, shelling, gas attacks, seeing close friends dying dying from either enemy fire or disease, scrounging for food and cigarettes. His comrades-in-arms are much like himself; school students, farmers and factory workers. The sadistic training officer who brutalized them in the name of getting them ready was a postman. He returns home briefly when he gets leave for a while, and again when he is recovering from injury. But the world at home is too far removed from the front-lines. His old acquaintances, unaware of the true ugliness of war, glorify the effort and the cause of the fatherland.
The story, much like the war itself, does not have a plot. It is a cautionary tale. There are no victors in a war. No one returns unscathed from the godawful mind-numbingly exhausting terror of war.
An absolute must read.