Little Albert Kropp; Muller who still carries his schoolbooks; Leer, with an eye for the girls and Paul Baumer missed by his sick mother-these are four classmates who have volunteered for the German army in 1914, with youthful optimism.

This is the story of their First World War-theirs and millions like them.

We read of carnage and shell-shock, but also of small comforts and jokes, tricks to get extra rations, stretches of boredom and banality.

No novel has portrayed more universally what Owen, writing of the same period, called the pity of war .