All Quiet on the Western Front

Summary

Paul Bäumer, a young German infantryman not yet twenty, tells in the present tense of his last two years in the Great War. He and his classmates Albert Kropp, Müller and Leer enlisted together, urged on by their schoolmaster Kantorek, and now serve in a company that has just come out of the line with eighty men left of a hundred and fifty. Their comrades include the shrewd older forager Stanislaus Katczinsky, called Kat, the farmer Detering, the peat-digger Haie Westhus and the hungry Tjaden. In the first chapters Paul's schoolfriend Franz Kemmerich dies in a field hospital after his leg is amputated, while Müller waits for his fine boots; the friends remember their training under the petty corporal Himmelstoss and take revenge by throwing a bed-cover over him and beating him on his way home from the pub. Going up to lay wire, the company is shelled, hears wounded horses screaming, and is caught by gas in a graveyard where the shells throw up coffins. A long offensive follows: rats in the dugout, a recruit who breaks down and tries to run out under fire, attack and counter-attack over cratered ground, and Haie's mortal wound in the back; when the roll is called, thirty-two men answer. On leave Paul finds that he cannot speak to his family or to the beer-hall patriots, that his mother is ill with cancer, and that his old books no longer reach him. He lies to Kemmerich's mother that her son died instantly. At a training camp he guards Russian prisoners and sees in their hunger the same men as himself. Back at the front, on patrol, he stabs a French soldier who falls into his shell-hole, and spends hours beside him as he dies; finding that he was Gérard Duval, a printer with a wife and child, Paul promises to write to them. Wounded while evacuating a village, Paul and Albert are sent to a Catholic hospital, where Albert's leg is amputated and the men learn of the Dying Room from which patients rarely return. In 1918, as Germany is starved and outgunned, the friends fall one by one: Detering deserts after seeing a cherry tree in blossom and is caught; Müller dies of a flare in the stomach; Leer bleeds to death; and Kat, whom Paul carries to a dressing station with a shattered shin, is killed on the way by a tiny splinter in the head. In the last pages Paul, resting after a whiff of gas, waits alone for the armistice. A final paragraph in another voice records that he fell in October 1918 on a day so quiet that the army report said only: All quiet on the Western Front. The novel was serialized in the Vossische Zeitung in 1928 and published as a book in Berlin in January 1929; A. W. Wheen's English translation followed in 1929.

Top Lessons

• Words and things

  Kantorek and the men of the home town speak of duty, glory and the Iron Youth; Paul and his friends meet shell-fire, gas, amputation and rats. The book sets the phrases of the schoolroom against the facts of the front and asks what a teacher owes the young before sending them to die.

• The enemy is a man

  In the shell-hole Paul learns the name, trade and family of the man he has stabbed. The enemy as an idea gives way to Gérard Duval, a printer, and Paul begs his forgiveness. The scene is the moral centre of the novel.

• Comradeship

  Kat finds food for everyone, the friends share boots, cigarettes and a stolen goose, and Paul carries Kat on his back to the dressing station. Remarque shows friendship as the one good thing the war gives, and its loss as the deepest wound.

• A lost generation

  Paul says that he and his friends were cut off from life just as they began to love it, and that they no longer know how to go home. The novel is less about a single battle than about young men emptied of their future.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Few novels give so full a picture of First World War military medicine from the patient's side. Kemmerich's amputation and death, the orderly who refuses him morphia because there is not enough for everyone, and the dressing-station surgeons who, the soldiers believe, amputate at the slightest provocation show triage under pressure. Chapter IV gives the gas drill and its terror, with a reference to gas patients coughing up their lungs; Chapter X lists the wards of a Catholic hospital run by nuns, with tetanus deaths, limbs in traction, X-ray plates, and a Dying Room for those not expected to live; Albert's leg is amputated and he is tempted to despair. The recruit in Chapter VI who panics in the dugout, Paul's numbness on leave, and his sense that his generation can never go home are often read now as descriptions of combat stress; in the period they fell under the contested category of shell shock or war neurosis, and Remarque uses neither term. Josef Hamacher's certificate after a head wound, his shooting licence, touches on wartime ideas of diminished responsibility. Hunger in the 1918 chapters reflects the blockade of Germany.

• Chapters I-II

  Kemmerich in the field hospital after the amputation of his leg; the orderly refuses morphia; Kemmerich's death and the passing on of his boots.

• Chapter IV

  The gas attack in the graveyard, the struggle to get a mask onto a recruit, and the recruit with the smashed hip whom the veterans think it would be kinder to shoot.

• Chapter VI

  Under days of bombardment a recruit is seized by a panic of suffocation and tries to rush out of the dugout; the men hold him down.

• Chapter IX

  Paul tends the French soldier he has wounded, bandaging him and giving him water through hours of dying.

• Chapter X

  The surgeons' table, Paul's fear of chloroform and amputation, the nuns' ward, the Dying Room, tetanus deaths, traction, X-rays, and Albert's amputation.

• Chapter XI

  Staff surgeons pass half-recovered men as fit; hunger and dysentery in 1918; Kat's shin wound and death from a splinter in the head.