Eric Maria Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front nearly a century ago. Many of his readers and his friends had traipsed through support trenches and gone over the top into the desolate No Man’s Lands of Belgium and Northern France. They had fought, killed and seen the human form brutalised beyond recognition.

The horror and absurdity of war that Remarque conjured up was shocking, even then. And the violence and cruelty of industrial warfare that director Edward Berger brings to the screen in his adaptation of Remarque’s seminal book is just as striking.