I had the opportunity to read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school, but the text means far more to me now - not simply because of my age and maturity but also because of my exposure to Brittain's Testament of Youth. Paul and his fellow soldiers are around nineteen, yet, when I first read this text, that seemed like a mature age. As a 24-year-old, I realize that nineteen is an incredibly young age to be confronted with the concepts and realities surrounding war firsthand.  I also recognize that Paul is forced to mature more as a nineteen-year-old than I ever was. He notes this as well at the end of chapter 1: "Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk" (18).

Paul and the other young soldiers are faced with an instant need to mature without having many consistencies in their lives to encourage them. For example, Paul notes that the older soldiers "are linked up with their previous life," meaning they have women, children, and jobs on the homefront to motivate their performance in the war o(19-20). The younger men, however, are in a unique stage of life in which they are too independent for both their parents and female companions. While some are interested in their educations, the trench does not prove to be an ideal environment in which to study. So with what are these young men left? They are left with each other and the art of war. And as the young men are killed, it seems as though war becomes the only consistent factor in their lives. By the end of the text, Paul says he knows “nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. [He sees] how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another” (263). It is mental distress from this consistent presence of death and destruction that remains an undertone of the entire text.

In conversation with Brittain's text, All Quiet on the Western Front proved to be especially interesting as it provided a perspective that could have been very similar to the character of Edward or Roland. Unlike Brittain, Remarque ends the book with an inability to compartmentalize the war and a lack of hope for the future. Brittain turns her anger and depression into a constructive pursuit of history, while Paul stops at the realization that his generation will always be misunderstood.