# data[].attributes.body
The Kaiser comes to inspect the soldiers. They are annoyed with all the drilling. They also have an extended conversation about the similarities between them and the French people and soldiers.

# data[].attributes.body
They come upon the evidence of trench mortars and see a lot of bodies in grotesque positions.

# data[].attributes.body
Paul gets lost in No Man's Land and then there is an attack. A frenchman jumps into his trench and Paul kills him with his knife. Paul then has to sit in the trench with the man he killed and he reflects on everything. He has a very big emotional reaction to killing that soldier.

# data[].attributes.body
Paul struggles to make it back to his trench but eventually does. He is worried about being killed with friendly fire. At the end of the chapter his friends try to comfort him about his guilt over killing the frenchman by pointing out Sergent Ollerich who is sniping enemy soldiers as if everything was a game.

# data[].attributes.body
The chapter opens with a scene unusually whimsical for a war front. Tasked with guarding a village with good provisions and supplies, our band of comrades, minus Haie, find themselves scavenging the village to make the dug out of the trench dressed and draped in" luxurious soft affairs"(232) Paul and Albert "find a mahogany bed which can be taken to pieces with a sky of blue silk and a lace coverlet. " Once the dug-out is made into a cozy comfy space, Kat and Paul seek out to satisfy their stomachs.

# data[].attributes.body
The crew is foraging, and scavenging the village, and quickly find suckling pigs to roast, as well as eggs, potatoes, cauliflower. "About twenty yards from out dug-out there is a small house that was used as an officers' billet. In the kitchen pans, and kettles-everything, even to a stack of small chopped wood...a regular cook's paradise." (p233)The crew starts to make their feast, and the smoke from the frying pans and roasts draw shell fire, and Paul must take cover, but is so used to the fire, does not abandon his favorite , potato pancakes. They feast for hours, finishing with cognac, rum, and cigars.

The feast costs the crew their desired rest for " the night is bad. We have eaten too much fat. Fresh baby pig is very griping to the bowels."(p237) All the men's bowels become loose and there is an "everlasting coming and going in the dug-out...about four o'clock in the morning we reach a record: all even men, guards and visitors, are squatting outside."(p237)

# data[].attributes.body
Amidst the irritable bowels an apocalyptic landscape is depicted on pg.237, the two weeks (fortnight) that our comrades are in the bombed out village the "Burning houses stand out like torches against the night." the abandoned village "gradually vanishes under the shells and we lead a charmed life. So long as any part of the supply dump still stands we don't worry, we desire nothing better than to stay here till the end of the war." The boys have been able to find comfort here and do not want the "palmy days" (238) to be over.

But after 8 more days they are called back, but this time, the boys are taking their comforts with them, erecting a grand caravan a makeshift baldaquin with their mahogany bed and silken covers, along with the big red armchairs that Paul and Kropp found. They sit upon their pilfierd thrown smoking cigars, with a cat between them rescued in a parrot cage purring. The lorries lurch, the shells "send up fountains" of the completely abandoned town and the boys sing.

# data[].attributes.body
The men are sent to evacuate a village and are confronted by encumbered refugees fleeing. " Their figures are bent, their faces full of grief, despair, haste, and resignation.. a few carry miserable-looking dolls. All are silent as they pass us by."(239) There is a thought that the French will not shell a village is still occupied, but before the column has gotten very far, Paul and Albert find themselves in the throws of a shelling. Albert is injured in the knee, but can still move, and so he and Paul move through the cover of a ditch, but the shelling follows them. Kropp comes to Paul and Albert's aid. Paul realizes he's injured and the men take turns bandaging up one another. The men are picked up by an ambulance. Albert says if they take his leg, he will "put an end to it" (242)

# data[].attributes.body
"In the evening we are hauled on to the chopping block. I am frightened and think quickly what I out to do; for everyone knows the surgeons in the dressing stations amputate on the slightest provocation." (pg 242)

Paul decides that if he isn't chloroformed then he has a better chance of surviving the surgeon's knife. The surgeon seems a sadist, taking pleasure in trying to get Paul to scream and lash out, but finds shrapnel puts Paul's leg in a splint and plaster cast. Albert and Paul will go on the medical train the next day.

# data[].attributes.body
Paul and Albert wait on their stretchers for the medical train, (pg 244), and they lament the loss of their plush chairs and mahogany bed, and worse "If only the train left one day later Kat would be sure to find us and bring us the stuff...In our bellies there is grue, mean hospital stuff, and in our bags roast pork. But we are so weak we cannot work up any more excitement about it." (245). Paul is taken aback by how clean and white the linen the new bed and finally admits he's ashamed to dirty them because of his lice, the nurse unphased says " Well, they (the lice) must have a good day for once, too." (247) this eases Paul's shame around his filth and he eagerly gets into the clean linen. Kropp and Paul are able to bribe their watcher to get them in the same train car.

They are embarrassed, at first by the need of care and aid from the nurses, but quickly get over their shyness. Albert gets a fever, and Paul, fearing they would be separated, fakes one, to be able to stay with his comrade.

# data[].attributes.body
Albert and Paul are in the same room in a Catholic Hospital, which they're happy about because they're known to have, "good treatment and good food." (p250). The hospital is crowded and has few surgeons, and the nuns prayers interrupt the patients' sleep a brief row ensues ending with the door closed, and a nun chirping "heathen" at the soldiers.

The next day an inspector comes to chastise and punish the soldiers, Josef Hamacher, has a shooting license and he takes the blame because, " Whoever has a shooting license can do just whatever he pleases." he explains " I got a crack in the head and they presented me with a certificate to say that I was periodically not responsible for my actions." the morale in the room is increased, because of Josef the wounded feel they have some power.

Theirs is a feeble power, though, unable to walk, when one of the 8 men starts to hemorrhage in the night, Franz Wachter, and the night nurse does not respond to the ringing of the bell until the third time. "He has been bleeding badly and she binds him up. In the morning we look at his face, it has become sharp and yellow, whereas the evening before he looked almost healthy. Now a sister comes oftener." (p255)

The men are torn between the unskilled but friendly red-cross sisters, and the gruff but dexterous nuns. Sister Libertine, is the only one who seems to be able to bring good cheer for the wing. The men learn of the dead room, and suspect that is where Franz is moved there, a few more are too, a young man named Peter is told he's going to the bandaging ward but worries he's actually being sent to the dying room and protests through tears, " I will come back again! I will come back again!"(pg258) Many are excited, but do not speak, Josef breaks the silence "Many a man has said that. Once a man is in there, he never comes through."

Paul is operated on and his leg is not healing well, he vomits for two days. Surgery is still a relatively new field, and may of the soldiers have a hard time with it, a few have experimental surgery for their flat feet, despite warnings from Josef.

Albert's leg is amputated to his thigh, and speaks little, but makes it clear he is suicidal.

Two new blind patients appear, one tries to kill himself with a fork and boot and in the morning he has lock jaw (p261)

People are dying so quickly that the death room seems pointless. It is a bleak scene.

Then one day Peter returns with Sister Libertine returning from the dying room, Josef admits that Peter is the first he's seen return.

# data[].attributes.body
Paul starts to get better and is given crutches to practice walking with. He feels Albert's stare, and leaves the room to not feel the weight of his survivors guilt. Out side of his room he is confronted with the grotesquerie of the "survivors" of the war. Paul looks around and thinks " A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is one one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia."(263) he continues to lament the overwhelming scene " How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It ust be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is." (263)

Paul concludes, bitterly, " I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow."

Paul sees and feels the cost of war, and is broken by it's terrible, absurd reality.

The author, Remarque, often gives us Paul's bleakest thoughts on his situation before presenting us with a scene of the lightness of life finding a way even into their pit of despair. This time it is when the oldest man in their room, Lewandowski's wife comes to visit, who he hasn't seen in two years, including a baby whom she's bringing. The men are eager to aid Lewandowski in this reunion, and keep watch to ensure the deed is done. Albert takes the young one, and the men play cards while Lewandowski and his wife, reacquaint themselves. This effort brings a shared intimacy and brief joy throughout the room as they share the home made food with and they start to call Lewandowski's wife, mother.

# data[].attributes.body
After a few weeks of being in the hospital, Paul is taken down to the massage department to help his leg heal.

The bandages are no longer cloth but a kind of crepe paper.

Albert's stump has healed, and he is due to be moved to an institute for artificial limbs. Paul thinks that Albert has gotten over the worst, and hopes for his friend, but cannot deny the change in his comrade.

Paul get's convalescent leave, and is able to see his mother, she is worse than before. He is recalled to the front. "Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army." (p 269)

The end of chapter ten there is an ominous feel. After everything Paul has seen and been through, to be called, once more back to the line, his thread of life feels perilously worn.

# data[].attributes.body
Spring. "Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without."(pg271)

Our men have grown accustomed to the war, nearly. Death is frequent for everyone at this time, soldier or civilian, just that war deaths are, "merely more frequent, more varied and terrible."(271)

Remarque spends time driving home the weariness of Paul and company, and the effect the war has had on their bodies and psyches. First the men's thoughts are like clay, then their former social identities eroded saying, "things that existed before are no longer valid, and one practically knows them no more. Distinctions, breeding, education are changed, are almost blotted out and hardly recognizable any longer." (272)

He drives home their interdependent, almost hive like connection saying, "It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp."

They are brothers, solidarity in their "desperate loyalty to one another of men condemned to death, to a condition of life arising out of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death."

They have resigned themselves to their fate. "If one wants to appraise it, it is at once heroic and banal-but who wants to do that?" Reflection on their reality does not give them hope, and whatever heroism they may be able to claim does nothing for them, unlike ham-and-pea soup.

# data[].attributes.body
"Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simple course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep;--in that besides our primitiveness and our survival." (273)

The nuance of how one survives the hellscape of the trenches can come down to not having a full belly when receiving a gut shot. Kat points out to Tjaden who eats in haste as though every meal is his last.

Survival instincts taking over, over their sense of humanness. They are bodies, with biological functions that must be maintained, and cannot afford the energy to be individuals, people this is evident when Paul says, "In the quiet hours when the puzzling reflection of former days like a blurred mirror, projects beyond me the figure of my present existence, I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnamable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form."(273)

If one had not yet been convinced that Remarque wrote this book to show why war is not the answer to the petty squabbles of the ruling class, this paragraph describing the need to annihilate one's sense of self and humanity in order to allow for a possible chance of survival, on page 273-274 he says:

"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."

# data[].attributes.body
Despite the best efforts of our company trying to stay in that pure instinct mode, ones humanness eeks out. "Those are the dangerous moments. They show us that the adjustment is only artificial, that it is not simple rest, but sharpest struggle for rest."(274)

The war becomes internalized, one of trying to deny their own humanity." We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out." (275)

Detering, could not repress his self any longer, for him it was the cherry blossoms that made his heart ache of home too much to ignore. When the company comes across a glowing blooming cherry blossom tree in the twilight it is too much for Detering. He is overcome with his sense of place-his farm, and tries to carry it with him by taking a few branches (276).

It doesn't work and only makes him more homesick, and soon, he finds himself going AWOL, a week goes by and the company learns that he has been captured and court-martialed. Paul laments the fate of his friend, "Anyone might have known that his flight was only homesickness and a momentary aberration." (277)

# data[].attributes.body
The toll of war and the inability to keep one's humanity at bay "broke out in other ways, this danger, these pent-up things, as from an overheated boiler." (277)

This brings us to how Berger met his end. After another battle, they get word that a messenger dog has been wounded and Berger's "front-line madness" causes him to seek it out, to put the poor beast out of its misery or to care for it, Paul is unsure, but no one can stop him because Berger is the largest of their crew. Berger is wounded in the pelvis and so is one of the other soldiers trying to save him from no mans land.

# data[].attributes.body
Muller dies of a point blank gut shot from a flare gun. In the 30 minutes it took him to die he "bequeathed" Paul his boots, the ones he had inherited from Kemmerich, after Paul dies, Tjaden will get them, if he out lives Paul. They were able to bury Muller, but Paul doesn't think that he will have an undisturbed grave for long.

The English and the Americans are fresh and new, and many.

"But we are emaciated and starved. Our food is bad and mixed up with so much substitute stuff that it makes us ill."(280)

Dysentery has taken hold of the German army, and the artillery stock is depleted. And the new German recruits, "merely know how to die. By thousands." (280)

Remarque is getting more brutal and dismissive now in his writing, most death at this point is merely gross and unceremonious. Paul is growing colder, more and more of a shell or even a ghost of a shell of himself.

# data[].attributes.body
"Germany ought to be empty soon" Kat expresses, the magnitude of the loss that they have all suffered.

If they aren't killed on the field or on the surgeon's table, and find themselves able to walk well with a wooden leg, then they are seen as still able to fight. Kat tells a story joking, "A fellow with a wooden leg comes up before him, the staff surgeon again says A1, 'And then,' Kat raises his voice, ' the fellow says to him: ' I already have a wooden leg, but when I go back again and they shoot off my head, then I will get a wooden head made and become a staff surgeon.'" (281)

Paul explains that perhaps there are good doctors, but too many of them have come across the "clutches of one of these countless hero-grabbers who pride themselves on changing as many C3's and B3's as possible into A1's." (282)

C3, B3 and A1 are all grades of fitness in the army. A1 is considered the fittest.

# data[].attributes.body
Chapter 11 is possibly the most nihilistic of the chapters in All quiet on the western front. One could argue the entire chapter is a rumination on the abominable reality of war.

War is not monolithic in its degradation either, no, it is every aspect of the human spirit and body that is riddled with the most despicable faces of and aspects of life. It never has been, but in WWI the first full fledged industrial war, you have some of the most horrific weapons invented first used. Chemical weapons, gas, white phosphorus, which set human flesh a flame, was used for the first time.

It is difficult to capture the reality of the horrors of war. Remarque, though does his damnedest in this chapter though. "We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armor-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded--we shrivel up in our think skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches."(282)

# data[].attributes.body
"The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the most terrible. The days stand like angels in blue and gold, incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation. Every man here knows that we are losing the war." (284)

The annihilation theme continues-"We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven back over by overwhelming superior forces." (286)

If the reader does not feel the weight of the despair of the soldiers yet, Remarque mercilessly persists. "The rifles are caked, the uniforms caked, everything is fluid and dissolved, the earth one dripping, soaked, oily mass in which lie yellow pools with red spiral streams of blood and into which the dead, wounded, and survivors slowly sink down."(286)

Survivors, this word does not seem quite right, as "Our Hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live." (287)

# data[].attributes.body
Kat is wounded. Paul unable to see a stretcher-bearer's post, carries his comrade. "Kat is not very heavy; so I take him up on my back and start off to the dressing station with him." (287) They rest, it costs of which is hard on both, worse for Kat, as his shin is smashed. Paul continues with his last friend. Desperate to save him, for his leg is dripping blood, the overwhelming reality of Kat's fate is too much for Paul to accept. There are jokes about being separated, and reminiscing over cigarettes, but no real acceptance of what their near future separation might mean for them both.

Paul uses his last bit of strength to take Kat carefully to the dressing station, laying him on his sound leg.

"You might have spared yourself that" an orderly says to a confused Paul

"I look at him without comprehending. He points to Kat. 'He is stone dead.' I do not understand him. 'He has been hit in the shin,' I say. The orderly stands still. 'That as well.' I turn round. My eyes are still dulled...I peer at Kat. He lies still 'Fainted,'I say quickly." (290)

Paul can't accept the death of his friend. He doesn't understand how it's possible. But as he cradle's Kat's head he discovers the head wound. A splinter, a tiny stray splinter has taken out Kat.

Paul is besides himself, he knows not what to do. His last friend. He takes his pay book from the orderly, who thinks Paul and Kat are related. Paul takes Kat's things stunned, " Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, on circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more." (291)

# data[].attributes.body
Autumn, 1918. Paul swallows gas and has 14 days rest, he believes the armistice might actually happen.

"Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experience we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more." (294)

What little hope Paul had before Kat's death has become an even weaker light. He imagines how life will go on after the war, for soldiers who some how make it out of the hellscape of the trenches.

"We will be superfluous even to ourselves,, we will row older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;--and in the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin." (294)

Paul resigns himself in his loneliness...

"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. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will within me." (295) Despite everything, Paul still feels his humanity, he can't make sense of how he still bears life with in himself.

----denouement---

October 1918, Paul falls on an oddly still day the army report read : All quiet on the Western Front.

"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."(296)