"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque

Wow.  This is the stuff they never told you about in school.  World War I at its worst.  Told from the point of view of a young soldier, the graphic and compelling account of life at the front, and the occasional attempts to get back to "normal" life are sad, pathetic, and heartbreaking.  The author was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis after this fictitious account was first published, so that alone tells you quite a bit about what went on.  May we never forget the horrors of war, and do all we can to prevent such tragic and senseless loss of life.

at the front:

• "We have lost all feeling for one another.  We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man.  We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill."

back at home:

• "I bite into my pillow.  I grasp the iron rods of my bed with my fists.  I ought never to have come here.  Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless;--I will never be able to be so again.  I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end.  I ought never to have come on leave."

towards the end of the war:

• "Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more."