Herr Remarque has the high merit of being very readable; yet [Three Comrades] is a failure. It has three themes, comradeship, love, and their contrast with the futility of life and the horror of the War that is over and yet continues; for Herr Remarque cannot forget the War…. [His] intense obsession with an important and universal subject gives Herr Remarque dignity, though the intellect will not accept his book; indeed, it is perhaps precisely the feeling that "the living seem more shadowy than they" which makes the ostensible subject of his book less real than the shadow which falls across it.

The girl herself is a shadow, an angel-shadow, the darling object of love, the subject of nothing; and comradeship here is inarticulate, and perhaps has to be so, for if Herr Remarque submitted it to the same bitter examination as life in general, it might not...