I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow...This is the testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German Army of World War I. They become soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught breaks into pieces under the first bombardment in the trenches.