Mr. Remarque in all his works has shown his fierce concern with the major issues of our time, war and collapsing social structures and the tragedy of exile. Arch of Triumph is a story of exiles in Paris in 1939, which illuminates with masterly skill all the despair and misery, the sense of impending doom, the folly, futility and fear of that lull before the storm. It is a sad and melancholy book, a tired and disillusioned one. But because it is steeped in a stoic atmosphere of fortitude in adversity, it is not without an affirmative faith of a grim and ironic sort.

Through the eyes of a refugee German surgeon Mr. Remarque shows us Paris as a city: its grimy night life, its desperate poor, its cynical and corrupt elements, its garish violence. The surgeon is in love with a worthless woman, and he is bent upon...