Erich Maria Remarque shows the dismemberment of the mental health’shealth of the soldiers to help the readers understand what exactly war does to a person’s mind. This is first made clear to the readers when Paul Baumer narrates, “We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from the activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.”(Remarque 87-88). Remarque is trying to address the issue that because the soldiers have lived and seen the horrors of war, they no longer seem to have the will or drive to live a life. The soldiers end up adopting this mentality that their only purpose is the war and nothing else.