The Impact of Warfare within Society
War, a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state, can exist in many different forms, such as civil war, revolutionary war, cyber war, world war, and others. Contrasting the two books, All Quiet on the Western Front is based on World War I, and on the other hand, A Long Way Gone is based on a revolutionary war within Sierra Leone. Although different in content, both books All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque and A Long Way Gone, a memoir by Ishmael Beah, have shown how war damages and ruins relationships within societies, which includes family, friends, and nature, and impacts on people’s lives.
People claim that they know how those who lost relatives and friends feel like, but they actually don’t because this feeling is special in a way that, if you don’t experience it yourself, you won’t understand it. In All Quiet on the Western Front, the main character called Paul Baumer experiences not only losses, but also physical and psychological changes. Paul, already a very sensitive person that has a lot of mixed feelings about war, is made miserable with the loss of all of his friends, especially Kat. Kat, or Stanislaus Katczinsky, is a veteran soldier about forty years old. He is a crusty, jocular cobbler and veteran of the battlefield, who serves as a noncommissioned tutor and father figure to Paul and the others. They depend on him for locating food, arranging for light duties, and helping them cope with the exigencies of survival, such as listening for incoming shells and sensing attacks. Not the least of his skills is the ability to joke in order to take the men's minds off bombardment. His death marks one of the stains in Paul’s memory- while Paul was trying to carry him to rescue, a splinter struck his head and he died on Paul’s back. After Kat’s death, Paul feels that his life now has nobody to depend on si...