Chapter 12 All Quiet On The Western Front

By Chapter Twelve of All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Baumer is disillusioned with his role in life and the role of his life as it used to be. All his adult life he has been entrenched in a war that has basically consumed everything about the world as he knew it and destroyed his perception of what everyone else would see as a normal and functioning society. As seen in the chapter where he visits home, Paul actually misses the battlefield when he is gone. He can no longer function under the normal pressures of society as his body has gotten used to being in high pressure situations all the time. 

“Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it again proves an illusion, then they will break up; hope is high, it cannot be taken away again without upheaval. If there is not peace, then there will be revolution.” 

            And even though he’d miss the battlefield, it has grown old. Watching people die and living in constant fear that he could be the next to go.

“It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the oncoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divinations of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.”

            It is possible though, that he still believes in the innocence of youth. That even though his classmates and other soldiers his age and younger have had to live and die on the battlefield, they still contain traces of the young men that they were. Hope for the future and hope of a future love still being held close to their hearts. 

“There are not many of the old hands left. I am the last of the seven fellows from our class.”

            He is the last surviving character that was introduced at the beginning of the novel, which makes sense he being the narrator and all. Of course that all changes on the backside of the last page when we learn he died on the quietest day of the year in what is possibly the least descript death of a main character ever. What killed him? A sniper? Too much gas inhalation? A ninja? Maybe even a bee sting? It is unlikely however, that it was as is shown in the movie. There were no birds or drawings involved.