All Quiet on the Western Front

'It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped it shells were destroyed by war.'
Is this the sole experience of the reader of the book? Is there more to this book than merely a tragic story.
All Quiet on the Western Front is the story of a man's growth from childhood to manhood accelerated by the war. It portrays the innocence of a generation taken from their safe classroom cocoon, and made some of them against their will, to be thrust into a brutal world of death and destruction which few would come through unscathed. Typified in the following paragraph " But in the end he let himself be persuaded, because he would have made things impossible for himself for not going. …