All Quiet On The Western Front

Chapter 1

The chapter begins with German soldiers at rest after fourteen days of fierce battle on the Western Front. A double ration of food has been prepared so the soldiers are eating their fill. Paul Baumer, the protagonist and narrator of the novel, watches in amazement as his friends, Tjaden and Muller, eat another helping; he wonders where Tjaden puts all the food, for he is as thin as a rail. Baumer is only nineteen years of age. He enlisted in the German infantry because Kantorek, his high school teacher, had glorified war and talked him into fighting for the fatherland. Kropp, Behm, and Leer, former classmates of Baumer, were also persuaded by Kantorek to join the infantry. They are all now fellow soldiers along with Tjaden, Westhus, Detering, and Katczinsky.

After a good night's rest, the soldiers are in line for breakfast. They are overjoyed that the cook has made food for one hundred and fifty men when there are only eighty of them; they again envision being able to eat all that they want. The cook, however, says that he can only distribute food for eighty; but the soldiers argue and overrule him. After breakfast, mail is distributed. Baumer and his friends stroll over to the meadow, located near the latrines. Baumer muses how embarrassed all of them were in the beginning to use the latrines that offered no privacy. Now all their modesty has vanished. Still, he believes that a "soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions."

Kantorek has written and sent a letter in which he calls his past students, now soldiers, "Iron Youth." Ironically, the young men, all of them around twenty years of age, are no longer youth; war has forced them to grow up beyond their young years. The old classmates talk about how they had idolized Kantorek while they were in school; now they hate him, blaming him for their misery. After all, he was the one who talked them into joining the military. They also blame him for the death of Josef Behm, one of their classmates who was the first of them to be killed. In truth, Baumer and his friends resent all authority at this point in their lives; the brutality of war that they have experienced has caused them to lose faith in the older adult generation.

The chapter next focuses on Franz Kemmerich, a friend ...

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... one month before the Armistice. Ironically, on the day of his death, "all was quiet on the Western Front."

Notes

The last chapter is filled with irony. Although there is talk of peace, Baumer cannot feel hopeful. He has been granted a rest because of gas poisoning and uses the time to reflect on the fact that he is the only one of his classmates who has survived the war; but he worries about his own future and the future of his generation, which has been stripped of hope and spirit by the devastation of the war. With bitter irony, Baumer is killed one month before the armistice. His physical death is not actually described, for it is anti-climatic; the real death for Baumer came with the departure of his friends. Each time he lost one of them to the war, a little of Baumer would also be lost; then when he lost his last and best friend, Kat, it was almost more than Baumer could bear. As a result, his death is almost a relief. In dying Baumer will be permanently re-united with his friends. Perhaps that is why Remarque chose the day of his death to be "All Quiet on the Western Front;" it is not a frightening and brutal end for Baumer, but a peaceful beginning.