In this week of the course, you will be studying the Great War. World War One, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, was truly a devastating, destructive, massive war. For the generation that fought in the war there could never be any return to the same kind of optimistic, free-flowing mentality that had characterized the prewar years. When war broke out in 1914, the citizens of European countries rejoiced and welcomed the outbreak of war. You can still see the surviving newsreel footage of immense crowds, joyous parades, flowers, bands, women, etc., in city after city, parading down the streets and marching to the centers of government; happy that war had finally broken out. That was not the way World War Two began in 1939, but in 1914 Europeans felt that war was long overdue, that war would be quick, that war would again re-establish one nation on top of the pecking order. (For example, the Germans thought that it was time to finally put the French in their place, and the French thought that it was time to finally settle accounts with the Germans. The Russians were pleased to have the opportunity to finally pay back Austria for its treachery, and the Austrians wanted to teach the meddlesome Russians a lesson.) The opinion was widespread that war was the inevitable product of the human social order and that periodically nations needed to engage in this exercise to determine which nation was the fittest of the fit. Of the millions of young man who marched off to war in 1914, only a few handfuls of men survived the entire war, and none of those men survived completely unscarred. Adolf Hitler was one of those men, as was Benito Mussolini. Millions of men died in World War One. In fact, there were more military casualties on the battlefields of the Great War than there were in World War Two. Men went fruitlessly to their slaughter across open fields against machine guns and emplaced artillery in mass charges on entrenched enemy positions with the result that men died by the thousands. In the opening sequence of the battle on the Somme River, in the first fifteen minutes of the British and Canadian assault on the German lines, something on the order of twenty-five thousand men died. That does not even consider the fate of the wounded. That kind of scene was repeated many times throughout the war. Generals on both sides were never particularly innovative in their attempts to apply new tactics. The fact that these were mass drafted citizen armies gave most commanders an almost unlimited manpower supply. And it was only really towards the end of the war, with the introduction of the new weaponry such as the tank, that tactics actually began to change. Your assignment for this week is the one-page paper based on the reading of Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. This is a powerful novel, based on personal experience, of the devastating impact of the war on a generation of young men. The specific question is: How did the war affect Paul and his comrades? Please remember that you are reading Remarque as a historian and not as a literary critic; you are looking for specific areas of impact, such as how the men felt about their patriotism or their families. Please do not just provide a list of effects, but provide in-depth explanation/analysis of just a few of the most important effects. Before writing the paper, you should review the style rules for history papers in the course. Your paper should include an introduction, paragraphs (each of which deals with a specific point you are trying to make) and quoted evidence from the text to support your analysis.