At a mine on the shared edge of France and Germany, an underground explosion leads to the entrapment of a group of French miners. In an effort to save the trapped Frenchmen, German miners Wittkopp and Kasper take it upon themselves to traverse a crumbling war tunnel leading down into the mines. Yet, though the workers harbor no political biases against one another, their callous, less tolerant bosses hope to halt this cross-cultural rescue mission.

According to Sadoul in his "Dictionary Of Films": "The life and death of four average soldiers attached to the same company on the French front during the last months of World War I. Karl (Diessl), from Berlin, goes home on leave and finds his wife (Hoessrich) in bed with another man. A Bavarian (Kampers) takes life as it comes, while the lieutenant (Clausen) sticks to his duty. Anex-student (Moebis) falls in love with a French girl (Monnier) but loses her when the company moves on. All of them, sooner or later, meet a terrible end. Best sequences: the men buried alive during a bombardment; the first romantic meeting between the young student and Yvette; Berlin in the midst of food rationing with queues at all the shops; the death of the student at the hands of a wounded soldier in no-man's-land; the tank attack; the lieutenant going mad; the wounded and the dying in the ruined church converted into a field hospital. "Far better than the contemporary All Quiet On The Western Front, Westfront 1918 has little dialogue but gives tremendous dramatic force to natural sounds (Pabst refused to use music). As John C. Moore describes the final sequences: 'Pabst makes one last desperate effort to convey to us not only the horror of war but its futility and its gross stupidity as well.' Released to tremendous international acclaim, it still must be included among the finest war films ever made."