Chapter Twelve

I'm not going to lie, when I started the book and heard what it was about, I was dreading reading it. But, it was actually a decent book. The last chapter was short, but probably made the biggest impact out of all the chapters. It describes Paul on leave, and everything is quiet and peace is almost there. He spends his days in a garden just sitting and he is almost excited about being done and going home. It describes how the war has changed them so much that other men won't understand them, everyone back home will have a place and they'll go home to nothing.
  It talks about how the day he died, all was quiet, and he died peaceful, "almost glad the end had come." There's a quote that stood out to me a lot in this chapter, "...The years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin." This whole last chapter talks about how they will simply go home to die, and people will never understand how much they did and how hard it was.
   This past summer, I had an amazing opportunity to go to Washington D.C. We visited almost every monument, but one that really impacted me was The Arlington National Cemetery. It's 624 acres of land, where over 300,000 men and women who fought for our country are buried. Men from World War 1 just like those in All Quiet On the Western Front are buried and remembered there. It's crazy to look around and see thousands of the same small white headstones everywhere you look in neat rows. I thought I should mention this mainly because it contradicts this book, and the books theme. The book is all about how in war death happens and in the end you fight for your country and really don't get much in return. How even if they won the war, there were so many of them that fought that they are almost lost in the group. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Gallery/Default.aspx?ID=933ac110-c76d-4818-b42f-5281f9cc8e57  That is a link to the website, they have some really cool photos of the cemetery!