[issybird]

I'm going to be contrarian and say that AQotWF didn't hold up to my memory of it. I've read a lot of Great War literature and there are many first-person and quasi-first person accounts with greater insight and of higher literary quality. This worked as the thoughts of a not-very-well-educated nineteen-year old, but the verisimilitude made it far less compelling to me than the accounts of the officer class. And the end was just cheesy. Remarque had it both ways; a first-person account would end either abruptly with the obvious inference or with the narrator having survived, but Remarque had to go for the final tug at the heartstrings with the third person ending. It would have been better just to stop.