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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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)

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.

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.

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.

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)

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)

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)

"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)