Every war begins in blind folly and ends in unimagined suffering. This is true of all wars but especially of the First World War. Its catalysts were so trivial and its consequences so apocalyptic that they belong in a Swiftian satire of human stupidity: the shooting of a bewhiskered potentate, followed by a botched game of diplomatic chicken, armies mobilized across Europe and cheered on by delirious publics, a whole generation sent to die by the millions in industrial warfare—all for a few miles of mud and barbed wire. Between the assassination in Sarajevo, the mass slaughter in the trenches, and the stagnant front lines lie disproportions so immense that cause and effect lose all relation. The conflict is a sustained demonstration of war’s essential inanity. “Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,” the critic Paul Fussell wrote in The Great War and Modern Memory. By this standard, World War I was the most ironic war in history.

What did the soldiers of the Great War think they were going off to defend? King, kaiser, czar, empire, democracy, European civilization, national honor—the reasons, in hindsight, make no sense. By 1917, the meaninglessness of the sacrifice had become clear enough to the combatants, if not to civilians back home: French and Russian troops mutinied, tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides deserted, the British poet and captain Siegfried Sassoon made a public anti-war declaration, and English war poetry turned brutal and bitter. Yet most soldiers, including Sassoon, fought on, under intolerable conditions—rain-soaked and hungry; facing machine-gun fire, shelling, and chlorine gas; surrounded by the half-buried corpses of their comrades and enemies—until the last minute of the last hour before the armistice on November 11, 1918, when, to quote John Kerry, an unknown soldier became “the last man to die for a mistake.”

In some ways, the enormous casualty figures are less staggering than the survivors’ endurance. After all, the living soldiers had to withstand the example of the dead. Near the end of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldier-narrator, Paul Bäumer, says, “Isn’t it remarkable that … regiment after regiment heads into the increasingly hopeless fight, and one attack after another is launched, even as the line recedes and crumbles?” Why did they keep fighting?

Remarque—born Erich Paul Remark in 1898—was a lower-middle-class Prussian, conscripted into the Imperial German Army at age 18, and wounded in action in Flanders after a few weeks at the front in the summer of 1917. That was the end of his combat experience, but the emotions and images of the war haunted him for the next decade. Im Westen nichts Neues was a sensation in Germany in early 1929, and was translated into English later that year. Soon it was available in dozens of languages, and to date it has sold more than 20 million copies—the best-selling German novel ever.

[From the July 1929 issue: Edward Weeks’s review of All Quiet on the Western Front]

A few months ahead of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which appeared in September 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front invented a genre: the warrior’s anti-war testament. Even those who haven’t read the novel are likely to recognize its English title as a sort of requiem for the dead—not ironic like the original German (“Nothing New in the West”), but as sad as the playing of “Taps.” So much that’s become familiar about this genre can be found in Remarque’s book: the journey of the protagonist from youthful idealism through hard experience to bitter realism; the worm’s-eye view of the common soldier, with his narrow focus on danger, physical discomfort, and food, and his hatred of authority; the sense of immediacy, anxiety, and inescapability that comes with episodic, present-tense narration; the unflinching details; the band of brothers that slowly diminishes as they’re killed one by one.

A version of these literary features can be found in earlier writers—Homer, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Stephen Crane. But Remarque gave war writing its modern voice, understated and terrifying, harsh and tender, a voice that says: This is what it’s like. You may not want to hear, but I have to tell you. A passage such as this one in Remarque’s novel—where the first-person narrator is trapped in a watery shell hole with the corpse of an enemy soldier he’s stabbed to death—couldn’t have existed in earlier fiction about war, but it’s become almost standard ever since, without losing its power:

The sun is shining at a slant. I’m numb with exhaustion and hunger. Yesterday is like a fog to me, I have no hope of getting out of here. So I doze off and don’t even notice when evening comes. Dusk is falling. It seems to me it’s coming quickly now. Just one more hour. Three more hours, if it were summer. Just one more hour.

These sentences come from a new translation by Kurt Beals, which renders Remarque’s German in a colloquial register—sometimes caustic, sometimes lyrical—that is itself a product of the Great War. As he explains in his introduction, the original English version of 1929, by an Australian veteran of the war named A. W. Wheen, “is frequently stilted and labored,” as if its prose belongs to an earlier period and wasn’t forged in the fire of the story it tells. In this passage from Wheen, the soldiers have just been inspected by Kaiser Wilhelm II:

Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is blowing bubbles. “But look,” he announces, “I simply can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I have.”

Here is Beals’s translation:

Tjaden is completely fascinated. His mind isn’t usually so lively, but now it’s bubbling over. “Look here,” he announces, “I just can’t fathom that a kaiser has to go to the latrine just like I do.”

He gives us a version that can stand as Remarque’s contemporary.

The huge popularity of All Quiet on the Western Front is a tribute to its universal accessibility. The novel’s force is undiminished by either its familiarity or its historical distance; the story it tells is at once time-bound and timeless. It doesn’t require any interpretive feats—it simply demands that the reader not look away. The narrative is fragmentary, nonlinear, and as static, in a way, as trench warfare. Young Paul Bäumer and his classmates in a provincial German town are exhorted by their schoolmaster to go defend the fatherland. Half a dozen enlist in the same regiment, are trained by an abusive corporal named Himmelstoss (a mailman in civilian life), and soon find themselves under fire somewhere on the Western Front. They learn the specific noise and lethality of each type of artillery, how to find cover in the open, where to forage for piglets and turnips. When one of them dies of his wounds, the others compete for his excellent boots. By the end, only Paul is left.

At one point, Paul and his old schoolmates discuss the reasons for the war. Who started it? Did the kaiser want it? Don’t both sides think they’re right? Who stands to gain? Not the common people, only politicians and generals. “It’s more like a kind of fever,” one of them says. “Nobody really wants it, but all of a sudden it’s there.” Finally they agree to drop the subject. From their point of view, the biggest questions about the war are unanswerable and change nothing. All they know is that they have to keep fighting to stay alive.

[From the December 2013 issue: The war no image could capture]

This is true for soldiers in any war, including “good” ones. In his essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” George Orwell, who fought in Spain against fascism, wrote: “A soldier anywhere near the front line is usually too hungry, or frightened, or cold, or, above all, too tired to bother about the political origins of the war … A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just.” Accounts from eastern Ukraine suggest that even soldiers who go off to fight with high morale to defend their country and freedom are eventually overcome by disillusionment not unlike that of Paul and his comrades.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they banned All Quiet on the Western Front and later revoked Remarque’s citizenship, accusing him of being at least French and maybe Jewish. They had their reasons: The great success of an anti-war novel threatened German nationalism and militarism. Hitler, himself a veteran of the Great War, hated any view of it as pointless slaughter. And yet All Quiet on the Western Front has no clear politics; its pacifism, too, is never stated, only implied. “This book is intended neither as an indictment nor as a confession,” Remarque declares in an epigraph, but as “an account of a generation of people who were destroyed by the war—even if they escaped its shells.” The novel presents the Great War as a crime perpetrated by the old against the young, the powerful against the ordinary, and civilians against soldiers.

This last conflict is the one that matters most—more than that between opposing combatants or political outlooks. Before All Quiet on the Western Front, alienation from the home front was rarely a concern of war literature, but it’s become a central theme, as indicated by the title of the Iraq veteran Phil Klay’s collection of short stories, Redeployment. In Remarque’s novel, the horror of the trenches is so radically separate from the rest of life that Paul finds being at home intolerable. When he returns on leave, he can’t bear his mother’s sorrowful love, his sister’s forced good cheer, his father’s fatuous pride, or the bullying of a rear-echelon major whom he encounters by accident. The attitude of civilians amounts to “Thank you for your service” and “On to Paris.” Paul’s only pleasure is seeing his jingoistic schoolmaster, now called up in the reserves, humiliated by one of his former students in the same pointless marching exercises that Paul once suffered through in the name of defending the fatherland.

[From the July 1937 issue: A review of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades]

Paul is like a ghost revisiting his past. But as he moves through the world of his childhood, the identity that’s allowed him to survive the trenches—“indifferent, and often hopeless”—is undone by the feeling that surges back, by the pain of wanting his mother’s comfort. He can’t be both a son and a soldier, and he chooses the second. “I never should have gone on leave,” he thinks, and when it ends, he returns to the war with a kind of relief.

This sequence plays a key role near the end of the 1930 American film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. Its 13 minutes are the movie’s quietest and saddest, but the subplot never appears in the 2022 German production, which won several Academy Awards. The omission is strange, rendering a relentlessly, grotesquely violent film less wrenching. In our time, with military service in most democracies, including America, limited to a small professional army, the chasm between civilian at home and combatant at war has never been greater. One result is that a filmmaker seeking to represent the horror of war as intensely and immediately as Remarque did is likely to make the mistake of showing little other than blood and mud. But Paul’s return home is pivotal to the novel, because in Remarque’s telling, war’s ultimate crime is to make soldiers fit for nothing else. The survivors, winners and losers alike, will come back “tired, broken, burned out, rootless, and hopeless”; incapable of understanding or being understood by the previous generation and the generation to come; doomed to live in their own tortured memories; “superfluous to ourselves.”

[Read: The All Quiet on the Western Front remake flattens the complexity of war]

Here is a partial answer to why the soldiers of the Great War kept fighting long after it was hopeless. They fought to avoid punishment, they fought for their brother soldiers, they fought out of lingering patriotism, and they went on fighting because they saw no way back.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “The Warrior’s Anti-War Novel.”

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Has anyone described the fear of dying more vividly than the 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich? In that novella, published in 1886, the protagonist lives the conventional, prosperous life of a Russian bourgeois. With little thought about life’s deeper meanings, he fills his days with the preoccupations of his family’s social position, his professional success, and his personal amusements.

But then Ivan Ilyich develops a mysterious ailment, which gradually worsens, confining him to bed. When it becomes apparent that he is dying, he is thrown into a profound existential crisis. “He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing there is no escape,” writes Tolstoy. “And he felt that with every minute, despite his efforts to resist, he was coming closer and closer to what terrified him.” The story describes the horror and sadness of Ivan’s predicament with astonishing precision.

Death is inevitable, of course; the most ordinary aspect of life is that it ends. And yet, the prospect of that ending feels so foreign and frightening to us. The American anthropologist Ernest Becker explored this strangeness in his 1973 book, The Denial of Death, which led to the development by other scholars of “terror management theory.” This theory argues that we fill our lives with pastimes and distractions precisely to avoid dealing with death. As Tolstoy’s novella chronicles, this phenomenon is one of the most paradoxical facets of human behavior—that we go to such lengths to avoid attending to a certainty that affects literally every single person, and that we regard this mundane certainty as an extraordinary tragedy.

If we could resolve this dissonance and accept reality, wouldn’t life be better? The answer is most definitely yes. We know this because of the example of people who have accepted death and, in so doing, have become fully alive. With knowledge, practice, and courage, you can do this too.

[From the November 1891 issue: Count Tolstoy at home]

A commonly held belief is that if and when someone learns that they are going to die, psychologically they deal with the grief involved in a series of clear, ordered steps: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This sequence comes from the famous work of the Swiss American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who devised this model for her 1969 best seller, On Death and Dying. This study had such extensive impact that the New York Public Library named it one of its “Books of the Century” in the mid-1990s.

As influential as it was, Kübler-Ross’s formula for coming to terms with dying did not actually make death easier for people to accept. One problem was that her model was interpreted in overly mechanistic and prescriptive ways by popularizers who suggested that you had to march through these stages in the fixed order. Another problem is that the experience, in her telling, is a progression of pretty much unrelieved negativity: It’s all grief, and even the final acceptance sounds essentially like a grim kind of resignation. From this, you might well conclude that distraction is indeed the best strategy—why face death unless and until you have to?

More recent work does not support the “fixed order” interpretation of the Kübler-Ross model. To begin with, researchers have shown that not everyone passes through all of her stages, and that people frequently regress in them and jump around—a point that Kübler-Ross herself made later in her career. In a paper published in 2007 in the journal JAMA, scholars found that denial or disbelief occurred only rarely, and that acceptance was where most dying people spent most of their time.

These findings also hold true for those who experience grief after losing a loved one, according to researchers writing in The British Journal of Psychiatry in 2008 who conducted a 23-month study of “bereaved individuals.” Initially after a bereavement, an individual experienced a higher level of yearning, depression, and anger, but after four months on average, these feelings declined steadily. From the start, however, the participants also displayed a level of acceptance that was higher than any of these negative emotions, and this rose continuously as well. By the study’s end, peaceful acceptance far outweighed all other feelings.

Other research confirms that many people facing death are far more positive about the prospect than almost anyone would expect. In a 2017 study titled “Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive,” my Harvard colleague Michael I. Norton and his co-authors showed that people with a terminal illness or on death row wrote about their predicament in more positive terms and using fewer negative words than people who were not in that situation but were asked to write about it as if they were.

Several factors explain why a positive acceptance of impending death may be so common. One 2013 Spanish study found that terminally ill patients tended to reevaluate their life and experiences in a positive light while also embracing acceptance. Many of these patients enjoyed new forms of personal growth in their final months, through placing greater value on simple things and focusing on the present.

Interestingly, the potential benefits of facing death directly can also be found among a very different group of people: those who have had near-death experiences. As a rule, these survivors had no chance to arrive at a calm acceptance of death—typically because, unlike terminal-cancer patients, they had no time to do so in a sudden life-threatening emergency. What they had in common, though, was being confronted with their mortality—and finding that paradoxically positive. One study from 1998 showed that after a near-death experience, people became less materialistic and more concerned for others, were less anxious about their own death whenever that time would come, and enjoyed greater self-worth.

[Read: Doctors don’t know how to talk about death]

One irony about death, then, is that it remains most fearsome when most remote: When we are not forced to confront it in the immediate future, mortality is a menacing phantasm we try not to think about. But such avoidance brings no benefits, only costs. When the prospect of dying is concrete and imminent, most people are able to make the fact life-enhancing through acceptance. The real problem with death is that it messes up our being alive until it’s right in front of us.

So what if we were able to realize the benefit of facing death without it actually being imminent? Or, put another way: How can we use a positive acceptance of death to help us be more alive while we still have the most life left?

In theory, we should all be able to do this, because we’re all in a terminal state. We are all going to die; we just don’t yet know when. Lacking this precise knowledge is probably what makes it hard for us to focus on the reality of our ultimate nonbeing, and we have a good idea as to why: Neuroscientists have shown that abstract worry about something tends to mute the parts of the brain responsible for evoking vivid imagery. When your demise seems in some far-off future, you can’t easily grasp the granular fact of it, so you don’t.

The secret to benefiting from your death right now, therefore, is to make it vivid and concrete. This is exactly what Buddhist monks do when they undertake the maranasati (“mindfulness of death”) meditation. In this practice, the monks imagine their corporeal self in various states of decline and decomposition while repeating the mantra “This body, too, such is its nature, such is its future, such its unavoidable fate.”

The Stoic philosophers had a similar memento mori exercise, as Seneca urged: “The person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day.” Catholics hear a comparable spiritual injunction when they receive a mark made with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

No matter what religious or philosophical tradition you adhere to, a practice like one of these is worth incorporating into your own routine. You can write your own maranasati or memento mori, say. Or, as an easier way to start, on your birthday or an annual holiday, work out roughly how many you may have left and ask yourself whether you’re really spending your scarce time the way you want.

Being mindful of mortality in this more vivid, concrete way will help you find a greater measure of that positive acceptance—and use that to be more fully alive right now. And this will help you make choices that affect other people besides yourself: At your next family gathering, consider how many more such reunions you’d want to spend with your parents or other aging relatives. Think of an actual number. Then think of what you would need to do to increase that number—by making more of an effort to travel, or by moving to live closer, or by hosting the occasion yourself?

[Read: Death has two timelines]

Tolstoy’s genius was not just in his ability to depict the terror of Ivan Ilyich’s death; he was also able to make real the bliss of his ultimate acceptance of death. As the weeks of his decline went by, Ivan began to see his wife’s efforts to keep up with society’s proprieties and conventions as trivial and tiresome, and he no longer regretted missing any of that. Finally, “he searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it,” writes Tolstoy. Ivan’s death is no tragedy at all, but the most natural thing in the world.

Even then, though, Tolstoy is not done; he ends with a true coup de grâce. At the very moment of his death, Ivan has an epiphany that might be the most consequential insight of all. As he is fading, he hears someone say, “It is finished.” In this last flickering moment of consciousness, Ivan considers what exactly is finished. Not his life, he decides, for it dawns on him: “Death is finished … It is no more!” And then, in peace, he slips away.