All Quiet on the Western Front

With an increasingly weary voice, Paul continues to elaborate upon the psychological degradation inflicted on the men at the front, especially on those who have been there for a long time. Using the symbol of the hole in the earth created by shellfire, Paul says: “fields of craters within and without” (146). The psyche of the men is destroyed, much like the ground on which they fight. Paul also alludes that even time itself has lost meaning. There are no distinctions between days and weeks. Without the sense of time passing, the men exist symbolically in a figurative No-Man’s Land where they cannot look forward to the future or backward into the past. The perpetual psychological trauma occasionally manifests itself in some of the men who lose their better judgment.

Despite the way the soldier’s psychological states have been altered, there are still moments when their innate humanity tries to break through. Paul says that in the extreme circumstances at the front, “unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up” which he immediately recognizes as “dangerous moments” (147). The men have come to realize that they must stifle these natural tendencies, which thereby sabotages their own humanity. The war makes the men do this out of necessity, but they do it to themselves regardless. Hope is the enemy.

As Paul outlines the devastation and the dehumanization taking place, he once again points out the blatant hypocrisy inherent in the notion that poor men fight rich men’s wars. He points out that while the men go hungry and are sickened by the terrible food they do receive, “the factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy” (150). Like many other occasions, the contrast between the wealthy profiting from the war and the men suffering at the front draws out the abject hypocrisy of the situation.

Chapter 12 is very brief, and it is an abrupt narrative shift. The point of view changes from Paul’s first-person to a nameless third person who informs that Paul has also been killed. The effect of this shift is that it turns the preceding 11 chapters into something of a presumed memoir written by Paul Baumer. This intertextuality comes without warning and without editorializing. It closes the account of Paul’s experience in the war, and after all of what Paul has written, it satisfies the logic of his primary assertion that he was always doomed.