Illustration for Erich Maria Remarque's novel "All Quiet on the Western Front" page 1

In the foreground, four or five soldiers in helmets and round-eyed gas masks crowd close together, their bodies cropped at chest height. Behind and above them a steep slope of ghostly, skull-faced figures rises into darkness, tangled in coils of barbed wire, one raised hand gripping the wire; a small black disc, like an eclipsed sun, hangs at the top of the composition.

The whole sheet is worked in charcoal, from near-black shadow in the corners to pale, luminous highlights on the mask lenses and skull cheekbones. Texture is built through dense, directional hatching and smudged blending, and the piling mass of the dead behind the living gives the image a heavy, oppressive weight, closer to grief than to action.