In Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick examined the First World War from the perspective of the French soldiers who refuse to obey suicidal orders and find themselves defending charges of cowardice in a court martial, facing potential execution. With Lewis Milestone's anti-war classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, the same war is viewed from the perspective of the Germans. Based on the novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, the film follows a group of young German men as they are plucked from village life and trained as soldiers before being sent to the trenches. As the artillery fire rains down and they face death in no man's land, their cheery dispositions as civilians quickly transforms into fear and despair. With battle scenes which still stand up to this day (Kubrick appears to have taken a leaf out of Milestone's book for Paths of Glory) it is a truly powerful work of cinema fully deserving of its status in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Remarque had fought in the trenches himself, as indeed had a German of a completely different character, Adolph Hitler. When the Nazis came to power, All Quiet on the Western Front was among the many books banned and burned. Inevitably, war-minded leaders are inclined to suppress any work which preaches peace.
