All Quiet on the Western Front

Paul and his classmates, recently arrived at the front, eat double rations after a battle. We meet the core group and learn how Kantorek's patriotic speeches drove them to enlist. The veteran Kat is introduced.

Paul's friend Franz Kemmerich is dying in a field hospital from an amputated leg that has gone gangrenous. Müller desperately wants Kemmerich's good English boots. Paul watches Kemmerich die and carries the boots back to Müller.

The recruits take revenge on Corporal Himmelstoss, their sadistic drill instructor. The company moves up to the front line to lay wire. Paul meditates on how the front has changed them and what they can expect from life after the war.

The company endures an artillery bombardment in a graveyard. Coffins and corpses are blasted from the earth. Paul rescues a group of terrified recruits. The screaming of wounded horses becomes the chapter's central sound — men bear their pain in silence; animals cannot.

Tjaden steals and roasts a goose. The men have a rare moment of warmth around a fire. Haie Westhus dies from a back wound. Detering, the farmer, sees a cherry blossom and walks toward Germany — and is never heard from again.

A major German offensive. Paul kills a French soldier, Gérard Duval, in a shell crater and spends the night with the dying man, discovering he was a printer with a wife and child. The company is decimated. Paul meditates on the individual humanity of the enemy.

Paul goes home on leave. His mother is dying of cancer. His father wants him to show off his uniform. He cannot speak to civilians about the front. He sits with his old books and cannot feel what they once made him feel. He returns to the front early.

Paul guards Russian prisoners of war and meditates on their shared humanity. The final chapters: the war ends for Paul's friends one by one. Müller, Leer, Bertinck die. Kat is wounded and dies on Paul's back. Paul dies in October 1918. The army reports it was a quiet day.