All Quiet on the Western Front (1996 [1929]) Erich Maria Remarque, tranlated by Brian Murdoch.

There is no end to war  and in 2014 there will be a lot of political  shuffling and looking back at The Great War to end all wars.  Remarrque  shows the landscape and futility of  life on the front line. Paul Baumer is the first-person narrator, and the book is structred so that it  moves only to the impersonal third person  in the last paragraph:

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army dispatches  themselves to the single sentence: there was nothing new to report on the western front.

The opening begins in medias res: ‘We are in camp five miles behind the line’. The cook’s gripe is he’s catered for  150, but English artillery meant only 80 had come back.  All the main characters are introduced by their attitude to food. Tjaden, a locksmith, in his former life, is as ‘thin as a rake’ and eats out of sheer greed. Muller, Kropp and Leer, classmates of Baumer, put something aside for another day, which they know might never come. They are all nineteen and been shamed into enlisting by Kontorek, a jingoistic school master. This had me thinking about Paul Hardcastles’s stuterring single success ‘nineteeen’ which went to number 1 in the UK, which was based on the premise that the average age of the US infantryman in Vietnam was...you guessed it. War is a young man’s game. There are exceptions.  Katcinzsky is  40, but he has that special gift for living and finding food and places they can put their heads down  that makes him seem both younger and older at the same time. The other old timer in their group is the conscripted farmer,  Detering, who worried about his wife and home and her inability to bring in the crop. The cold and the wet and the lice and the rats and the sharpnel and the hand to hand combat over a muddy piece of ground fails to break him. Deterring’s undoing is the sight of a Holly bush in bloom. No one makes it unscathed. Those on the front line, whose job it is to kill other men, know the value of listening to their bodies and the lessons of fear. They become as aged as Arsistole and see no difference in risking their lives for a good cigar and a lamb cutlet as for the tomfoolery of some master tactician that moves them about.  They have no special hatred for the enemy, other soldiers, under the same sky, but on the other side of the barbed wire. Their hatred is held for those in cushy billets, drill-corporal Himmlestoss, for example, who put them through basic training. For Westhaus, a former peet digger, the high point of his life is when they ambush Himmlestoss and give him a sound thrashing.  Muller’s insistence  that they imagine what kind of life they should have away from the front line is met with jeers. Baumer is given a few weeks leave and he shows the impossibility of any other kind of life, because he takes the front line back with him. His family do not and cannot understand  and there are no words that can explain or bridge the gap between them. Now that he is broken Brumer’s family are  the men he left behind on the Western front and words and learning are useless baubles there. His time away makes him soft and almost kills him when he returns to the water-filled trenches. All of the soldiers we meet in the opening paragraphs are killed,  the exception being Muller, who loses a leg and would rather be dead.

          When the armistice was signed 10 million men had lost their lives at the front and 20  million were wounded.  This beautiful  book speaks in that arcane dead language of he that has paid the ferryman and should be heard.