Quiet on the front, but loud in a little boy's heart.

This book has towered in my reading life, so much so I wonder why it has taken me so long to write about it.

It was the first book I was ever MANDATED to read ( for school, of course) that actually because a pleasure, a joy.. and a landmark for me.

At the age of 11 in Advanced Program English at my school, most of what we had had to read because we were the " smart" people was drudgery. Not only did this book become dear, it awakened a lot in me emotional-maturity wise.

Eleven year old boys aren't exactly the most sensitive creatures on earth.. we don't cry at movies ..we don't say we miss friends.. we don't exactly teem yet with mushy sensibilities.

Yet when I read this book about a wealth of German adolescents getting ready to go to fight in WW1 , nerves got struck all over the place with the resoundingness of dropping garbage cans in caves. All these guys , all scared.. all trying to be tough.. all too macho to flat out say they loved each other but aching for some sort of emotional support at the scariest time of their lives... this spoke to me. Loudly. And I don't think for a minute this didn't have something to do with the fact that at the time when I was 11, everyone was JUST beginning to discuss the emotional fallout on such American boys coming back from Vietnam.

The book is basically some friends stories as they deal with their new lives, and sometimes deaths as soldiers. IT is not a flame-war of blood and guts.. this book is special so much because of Mr. Remarque's bittersweet and heartbreaking set pieces... such as the giving of boots away when one soldier is going to die.. and for the biggest impact.. what happens at the end of this novel giving the title it's gut-wrenching irony is the first thing I can ever remember actually CRYING about that happened in a piece of fiction.

Young, old.. whoever you are.. while I don't mean to be sexist I especially think that men who care about the power and pull of deep friendship especially in difficult circumstances need to read this novel. I think its power to touch has definitely not diminished in the past 22 years since an 11 yr.old realized not only the power of friendship and wartime emotions.. but the power of literature itself.