All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque essay
? Chandler Hersom Ms. Jones English 2 Honors August 24, 2013 Passage no. 1 Page 7 Chapter 1 “While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards–they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left.
We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through” How I believe this passage pertains to the text, is that the narrator is experiencing the futility of war. The narrator is saying that he understands the importance of doing his duty for his country, but that terrible things they face in war are more powerful and fearsome than any duty to country. He is referring to people who get ostracized and labeled as deserters, cowards or mutineers because they are afraid or because they desert, but no one can truly empathize unless they have faced what the soldiers have faced.
In the end, even though those at home support them, when they have to face the reality of war and walk forward into it, they are alone. The people safe at home cannot support them then. Passage no. 2 Page 8 Chapter 1 “We look at his bed covering. His leg lies under a wire basket. The bed covering arches over it. I kick Muller on the shin, for he is just about to tell Kemmerich what the orderlies told us outside: that Kemmerich has lost his foot. The leg is amputated. He looks ghastly, yellow and wan. In his face there are already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen them now hundreds of times.
They are not so much lines as marks. Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has already pressed out the boundaries of the body. Death is working through from within. It already has command in the eyes. Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes. He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes. ” This passage signifies how quickly war can take a life.
It explains how Kemmerich was roasting horse flesh a little while ago and now all the sudden he’s frail, weak, and sickly. It shows how changing death is on a person. Passage no. 3 Page 10 Chapter1 “Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth. Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk. ” How this passage is important to the text is that it shows how the war has aged these young men beyond their years. Kantoreck is obviously a very patriotic man, and he is praising them for their heroism.
However, it is perceived that once upon a time the man they once idolized they now hate for exposing them to the terrors of war. Passage no. 4 Page 11 Chapter 2 “It is strange to think that at home in the drawer of my writing table there lies the beginning of a play called “Saul” and a bundle of poems. Many an evening I have worked over them–we all did something of the kind–but that has become so unreal to me I cannot comprehend it any more. Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand. We often try to look back on it and to find an explanation, but never quite succeed.
For us young men of twenty everything is extraordinarily vague, for Kropp, Muller, Leer, and for me, for all of us whom Kantorek calls the “Iron Youth. ” All the older men are linked up with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have only our parents, and some, perhaps, a girl–that is not much, for at our age the influence of parents is at its weakest and girls have not yet got a hold over us. Besides this there was little else–some enthusiasm, a few hobbies, and our school.
Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains. ” This particular passage stood out to me because the concept the author is trying to get across is that these men are on the threshold of life. They just got out of school, and they were thrown into this lifestyle which totally obliterates almost all memory of past life. They had no jobs to come back to, no wife or children to look forward to seeing, they just started living out on their own. And what these soldiers are going through at the age they are is an eye opener for me because I am the same age as they are. Nearly.
If I put myself in their shoes I would be at loss as far as what I would do when the war ended. Passage no. 5 page 27 Chapter 4 “ Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!
At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along without thought or heed;–suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of fragments flies harmlessly over him;–yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself down.
But had he not abandoned himself to the impulse he would now be a heap of mangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how. If it were not so, there would notice one man alive from Flanders to the Vosges. “ I believe this passage is important to the text because it gives better insight to what actual combat was like in world war 1. It explains how life threatening war really was, on another note describes how much these soldiers relied on the earth for cover from bombardment. Passage no. 6 Page 54 Chapter 6 “We have become wild beasts.
We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down–now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged. ” The importance of this particular passage is fact that these men are fighting for their lives, it conveys the emotions that the characters are experiencing.
Death is being personified as something that is coming after them. Passage no. 7 Page 55 Chapter 6 “We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. ” This passage highlights how desensitized these men have become to bloodshed. They have past the point where they are compassionate. The only way they can keep themselves from going insane is by shutting their emotions off completely. Passage no. 8 Page 66 Chapter 7 The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:–against whom, against whom? ” What this passage is telling us, is that even after the war ends, the soldiers will be haunted for the rest of their lives. Passage no. 9 Page 89 Chapter 8 “It is distressing to watch their movements, to see them begging for something to eat. They are all rather feeble, for they only get enough nourishment to keep them from starving.
Ourselves we have not had sufficient to eat for long enough. They have dysentery; furtively many of them display the blood-stained tails of their shirts. Their backs, their necks are bent, their knees sag, their heads droop as they stretch out their hands and beg in the few words of German that they know–beg with those soft, deep, musical voices, that are like warm stoves and cosy rooms at home. ” Paul Baumer is describing his sympathy of the prisoners because of the hardships they are facing while in the position they are in. This is also the reason this particular book was banned in World War 2. Passage no. 10 Page 130 Chapter 11 All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death;– it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct–it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought–it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude–it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness.
Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up. ” When these soldiers are fighting, they must but their emotions deep down somewhere, otherwise they would go insane. Their comrades were the only family that could truly understand the horrors they have faced. Passage no. 11 Page 133 Chapter 11 “From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon. Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, more than anything else embody for us the horror of war. ”
This line shows that the tanks are a great adversary against them. There is no way for them to combat against it. Passage no. 12 Page 134 Chapter 11 “Still the campaign goes on–the dying goes on –“–” Thus the end of the war is coming about. The Germans are being slaughtered and are running out of ammunition. Passage no. 13 Page 135 Chapter 11 “Summer of 1918–Never was so much silently suffered as in the moment when we depart once again for the front-line. “ Paul and his comrades desperately do not want to go back to the front line, they feel that they have a good chance of dying. Passage no. 4 Page 135 Chapter 11 “Summer of 1918–Never was life in the line more bitter and more full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment! ” They’re falling like flies out on the front lines, as they desperately clutch at life. Passage no. 15 Page 139 Chapter 12 “I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. “ Paul has nothing left. His friends are dead.
His mother is sick, and he is on the brink of insanity. Passage no. 16 Page 140 Chapter 12 “Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings–greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims. ” He has no will live anymore, he just floats everywhere, no desires, no plans, no future. Passage no. 17 Page 140 Chapter 12 “We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;–the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin. What he is trying to say is that when the war ends. Those that served on the front lines were so brutally traumatized that they no longer fit in with society. Passage no. 18 Page 140 Chapter 12 “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. ” This sentence show us that the title was actually the foreshadowing of his death, and it also tells us his death wasn’t due to a casualty on the battlefield. Passage no. 19 Page 140 Chapter 12 He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come. ” Death was the only sanctuary that he had. He could see all his comrades and his mother in the afterlife so he just accepted death. Passage no. 20 Page 16 Chapter 2 “He sniffs: “How should I know anything about it, I’ve amputated five legs to-day”; he shoves me” The doctor has amputated so many legs in a short period of time that he can’t do any more amputations without breaking down mentally.