90 pages • 3 hours read
All Quiet on the Western Front
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Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The men are relieved of front-line duty and have a momentary pause from the fighting. Himmelstoss, whom the men all hate, has changed his ways somewhat after having experienced the horrors of the front. Paul then recalls a memory of seeing movie posters romanticizing war. When the men pull apart the posters so that only the beautiful woman remains, they speak hypothetically about what they could do to impress her. All of their talk is unrealistic, but they indulge themselves, nonetheless. The memory proceeds to a description of a chance meeting with French girls. Paul experiences a tender affection for one of the girls which brings out in him what might be called melancholy.
Paul is given a leave of absence of 17 days, and upon his return, he will fall in with a different company and that will require training. Even though Paul will be away from the front for 6 full weeks, he begins to worry about what will happen while he is gone, and he is gloomy rather than happy about being away from his company at the front. Upon returning to his home village, Paul notices that things there seem to be the way they have always been.
When Paul finally makes his way to his mother’s home, and is noticed by his sister, he freezes up and cannot utter a word; instead, he begins to cry there in the main entryway to the house. Paul at last composes himself and goes to his mother’s room. She is ill, presumably with cancer, and they don’t speak much. During his time at home, Paul is unable to fully realize where he is and that he is in what should be familiar territory. It’s as though the whole scene is surreal for him.
Paul has a very difficult time coping with the temporary return to civilian life. He seeks comfort in the book collection that he accumulated during his youth, but he does not find it. Finally, he visits Middlestadt at the barracks and there finds at least some sense of ease. As his leave time dwindles, Paul decides he must visit Kemmerich’s mother and give her the news of his passing. Although she insists on hearing the full details of how her son died, Paul steadfastly insists on providing the noble lie that it was a painless death. The chapter concludes with Paul lying in his bed and his mother entering the room. Their conversation is concise and short on words, but what is unspoken seems to have far more significance than what is spoken.
Chapter 7 Analysis
Paul reflects on the alternate ways he and the men survive the front and how they recover their senses when on reprieve which takes a combination between stoicism and dark humor. The chapter begins with a deep examination of the psychology of being a soldier during WW I. Because of the psychological trauma suffered by the men, when they are not engaged in the horrors of trench warfare, their thoughts consist only of what is necessary. As Paul puts it, “terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; but it kills, if a man thinks about it” (75). The men must keep their thoughts away from recalling the front and the way they do that is by defending themselves against that anxiety the best way they know how, staying grounded in the moment.
Paul also says, “fear we do not know much about—terror of death, yes; but that is a different matter, that is physical” (76). Again, Paul probes into psychology here, clearly delineating the different degrees of fright. For him, a soldier fighting this heinous war, fear in the abstract is a state of mind. It comes from anxiety, and it grows according to the proportion of anxiety a person senses. If fear is a result of anxiety, then terror is something else entirely. It cannot be articulated or filtered through the faculty of language. It is something primal, something felt not thought. When this is a near constant experience in the trenches, it is logical to see how a man like Paul can claim that fear is only a state of mind and one that is not to be brooded over for long.
The psychological devastation suffered by the men is made even more dramatic when Paul is given leave and returns home. There, he reunites with his sister, mother, and father. Immediately, Paul recognizes that he feels strange being home and says, “I cannot feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogany piano—but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us” (87). A few days into his leave, Paul hears streetcars and immediately his tension escalates as he experiences shell shock, now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), for the first time. His inability to find his bearings and take refuge in his former life is representative of the veterans of this war who after returning to peace struggle to actually find peace in their personal lives. Paul doesn’t fit in at his childhood home any longer because the war has changed him.
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