Chapter 12
Summer turns into fall. Paul is the last of the boys from his class. Peace, it seems, is right around the corner. Paul is resting because he was hit with some gas. He thinks of going home, but he cannot make plans. He has been destroyed. No one will be able to understand him or any other soldiers, he thinks. He looks around and hopes that joy will return to him:
"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 that is within me." Chapter 12, pg. 295
Topic Tracking: Comrades 16
With that final statement, Paul dies. "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. 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." Chapter 12, pg. 296
Topic Tracking: Isolation 12
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