Chapter Eleven

  Yes, I know I skipped chapters nine and ten, but i just felt like they weren't very important. Most of Paul's friends died, and he and Albert travel from hospital to hospital together. Chapter 11 though, whoa, that was a big one. It is mainly discussion about how they view their lives now. There's a quote, "As in a polar expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and is absolutely focused on that." I think that's crazy, that the war has changed them to the point where they don't even care about being happy, or doing something fun. Staying alive is the only thing that matters anymore to them.
  Another big part of chapter eleven was the very first part, where they talk about how lightly they react to death. One quote was, "We have almost grown accustom to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible." It also says in detail about how the soldiers have to take death so lightly, and be so used to it so that they are able to act on instinct, like animals. It talks a lot about how they act instinctively but it's superficial. I don't exactly understand what they mean by this, but I guess it means that it's forced instincts, but that doesn't sound right since forced and instincts are opposites.
   I also thought I should point out that Kemmerich's boots came up again. Just before Muller died, he gave the boots to Paul, and Paul already planned to pass them to Tjaden when he passes. When Kemmerich gave them up to Muller it was when he was dyeing, and it represented how lightly death was taken in war, and how even though he was dying, one of the biggest things they thought about were getting his boots, and now they would be passed on, representing again, how used to death soldiers become.
I found these pictures, I really like the one with the trench at the top and the one on the bottom left of a soldier in a gas mask firing a gun, like they so often described in All Quiet On the Western Front.