39 Most Widely Read War Novels: Introduction and Plot Summaries

By Students' Academy

Wars have been an inevitable part of human world, for humans are prone to conflicts, arguments, fights, and wars. We have already fought two World Wars and then there have been several other wars such as Vietnam War, Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and so on.

This book includes the introduction and summaries of 39 most widely read war novels from different writers from different countries. All these novels have their highly distinct place in the history of world literature.

The brief summaries in this book will tell you what these books are about.

All the best

Students’ Academy

39 Most Widely Read War Novels: Introduction and Plot SummariesCopyright
Preface
A Farewell to Arms
All Quiet on the Western Front
Andersonville
Birdsong
Blood Meridian
Catch-22
Cold Mountain
Ender's Game
For Whom the Bell Tolls
From Here to Eternity
Johnny Got His Gun
Johnny Tremain
Life and Fate
March
Matterhorn
Names in Marble
Red Storm Rising
Sharpe's Tiger
Shōgun
Slaughterhouse-Five
Sophie's Choice
The Book Thief
The Bridge over the River Kwai
The Caine Mutiny
The Eagle Has Landed
The Forever War
The Good Earth
The Good Soldier Švejk
The Hunt for Red October
The Killer Angels
The Kite Runner
The Last of the Mohicans
The Naked and the Dead
The Quiet American
The Red Badge of Courage
The War of the Worlds
The Winds of War
War and Peace
War and Remembrance

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Nov 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370654307

Students' Academy

Easy study guides for the students of English literature.

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39 Most Widely Read War Novels: Introduction and Plot Summaries

Students’ Academy

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Table of Contents

39 Most Widely Read War Novels: Introduction and Plot Summaries

Copyright

Preface

A Farewell to Arms

All Quiet on the Western Front

Andersonville

Birdsong

Blood Meridian

Catch-22

Cold Mountain

Ender's Game

For Whom the Bell Tolls

From Here to Eternity

Johnny Got His Gun

Johnny Tremain

Life and Fate

March

Matterhorn

Names in Marble

Red Storm Rising

Sharpe's Tiger

Shōgun

Slaughterhouse-Five

Sophie's Choice

The Book Thief

The Bridge over the River Kwai

The Caine Mutiny

The Eagle Has Landed

The Forever War

The Good Earth

The Good Soldier Švejk

The Hunt for Red October

The Killer Angels

The Kite Runner

The Last of the Mohicans

The Naked and the Dead

The Quiet American

The Red Badge of Courage

The War of the Worlds

The Winds of War

War and Peace

War and Remembrance

Preface

Wars have been an inevitable part of human world, for humans are prone to conflicts, arguments, fights, and wars. We have already fought two World Wars and then there have been several other wars such as Vietnam War, Iraq War, Afghanistan War, and so on.

This book includes the introduction and summaries of 39 most widely read war novels from different writers from different countries. All these novels have their highly distinct place in the history of world literature.

The brief summaries in this book will tell you what these books are about.

All the best

Students’ Academy

A Farewell to Arms

Introduction

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway was first published in 1929. The story is set during the Italian campaign of the First World War.

The book presents a first-person account of Frederic Henry, an American, who happens to be a Lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.

The book is primarily about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of populations.

Plot Summary

A Farewell to Arms is divided into five books. In the first book, Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver serving in the Italian Army is introduced to Catherine Barkley, an English nurse, by his good friend and fellow paramedic Rinaldi. Frederic attempts to seduce her, and their relationship begins. Frederic didn't want a serious relationship, but his feelings for Catherine slowly start to grow.

On the Italian front, Frederic is wounded in the knee by a mortar and sent to a hospital in Milan, where Catherine is also sent.

The second book shows the growth of Frederic and Catherine's relationship as they spend time together in Milan over the summer. Frederic and Catherine fall in love as Frederic slowly heals.

After his knee heals, he is diagnosed with jaundice but is soon kicked out of the hospital and sent back to the front after being discovered with alcohol. By the time he is sent back, Catherine is three months pregnant.

In the third book, Frederic returns to his unit, and soon discovers morale has severely dropped. Not long afterwards the Austrians break through the Italian lines in the Battle of Caporetto, and the Italians retreat.

Due to a slow and hectic retreat, Frederic and his men go off trail and quickly get lost, and a frustrated Frederic kills a sergeant for insubordination.

After catching up to the main retreat, Frederic is taken to a place by the battle police, where officers are being interrogated and executed for the treachery that supposedly led to the Italian defeat.

However, after seeing and hearing that everyone interrogated has been killed, Frederic escapes by jumping into a river. He heads to Milan to find Catherine only to discover that she has been sent to Stresa.

In the fourth book, Catherine and Frederic reunite and spend some time in Stresa before Frederic learns he will soon be arrested. He and Catherine then flee to Switzerland in a rowboat.

After interrogation by Swiss authorities, they are allowed to stay in Switzerland. In the final book, Frederic and Catherine live a quiet life in the mountains until she goes into labor.

After a long and painful birth, their son is stillborn. Catherine begins to hemorrhage and soon dies, leaving Frederic to return to their hotel in the rain.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Introduction

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was first published in 1928. The book was originally titled In the West Nothing New as translated from it German title.

The novel describes how the German soldiers went through extreme physical and mental stress during the War. When these soldiers come back home, several of them feel detached from civilian life and the other members of their communities.

In the first eighteen months of its printing, more than 2.5 million copies of the book were sold in twenty-two languages. The novel was adapted into a movie in 1930. The movie was of the same name. It was a highly successful movie.

Plot Summary

The story primarily follows the life of Paul Baumer, a German soldier, who is inspired by his school teacher to join the German army soon after the beginning of the First World War.

His class was scattered over the platoons amongst Frisian fishermen, peasants, and labourers. Baumer arrives at the Western Front with his friends and schoolmates (Leer, Müller, Kropp and a number of other characters).

There they meet Stanislaus Katczinsky, an older soldier, nicknamed Kat, who becomes Paul's mentor. While fighting at the front, Bäumer and his comrades have to engage in frequent battles and endure the treacherous and filthy conditions of trench warfare.

At the very beginning of the book, Erich Maria Remarque says "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it.

It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped (its) shells, were destroyed by the war." The book does not focus on heroic stories of bravery, but rather gives a view of the conditions in which the soldiers find themselves.

The monotony between battles, the constant threat of artillery fire and bombardments, the struggle to find food, the lack of training of young recruits (meaning lower chances of survival), and the overarching role of random chance in the lives and deaths of the soldiers are described in detail.

The battles fought here have no names and seem to have little overall significance, except for the impending possibility of injury or death for Baumer and his comrades. Only pitifully small pieces of land are gained, about the size of a football field, which are often lost again later.

Remarque often refers to the living soldiers as old and dead, emotionally drained and shaken. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing 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.

Paul's visit on leave to his home highlights the cost of the war on his psyche. The town has not changed since he went off to war; however, he finds that he does not belong here anymore, it is a foreign world.

He feels disconnected from most of the townspeople. His father asks him stupid and distressing questions about his war experiences, not understanding that a man cannot talk of such things.

An old schoolmaster lectures him about strategy and advancing to Paris, while insisting that Paul and his friends know only their own little sector of the war but nothing of the big picture.

Indeed, the only person he remains connected to is his dying mother, with whom he shares a tender, yet restrained relationship. The night before he is to return from leave, he stays up with her, exchanging small expressions of love & concern for each other.

He thinks to himself, Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it. In the end, he concludes that he ought never to have come [home] on leave.

Paul feels glad to be reunited with his comrades. Soon after, he volunteers to go on a patrol and kills a man for first time in hand-to-hand combat. He watches the man die, in pain for hours. He feels remorse & asks forgiveness from the man's corpse.

He is devastated and later confesses to Kat and Albert, who try to comfort him and reassure him that it is only part of the war. They are then sent on what Paul calls a good job. They must guard a supply depot in a village that was evacuated due to being shelled too heavily.

During this time, the men are able to adequately feed themselves, unlike the near-starvation conditions in the German trenches. In addition, the men enjoy themselves while living off the spoils from the village and officers' luxuries from the supply depot (such as fine cigars).

While evacuating the villagers (enemy civilians), Paul and Albert are taken by surprise by artillery fired at the civilian convoy and wounded by a shell.

On the train back home, Albert takes a turn for the worse and cannot complete the journey, instead being sent off the train to recuperate in a Catholic hospital.

Paul uses a combination of bartering and manipulation to stay by Albert's side. Albert eventually has his leg amputated, while Paul is deemed fit for service and returned to the front.

By now, the war is nearing its end and the German Army is retreating. In despair, Paul watches as his friends fall one by one. It is the death of Kat that eventually makes Paul careless about living. In the final chapter, he comments that peace is coming soon, but he does not see the future as bright and shining with hope.

Paul feels that he has no aims or goals left in life and that their generation will be different and misunderstood. When he dies at the end of the novel, the situation report from the frontline states, All is Quiet on the Western Front, symbolizing the insignificance of one individual's death during the war.