Chapters 9-12. 

This reading is so dense with so many topics; the fight with Gerard Duval in the shell crater, line leadership, the description of life and death in a field hospital, what men hope for “after” the war…. But I want to examine two things: the writing about food in chapter 10 and then in chapter 11 the summer of 1918 and how Bäumer and his fellow soldiers desperately cling to the hope of making it out alive as it appears the war is winding down.

Food!  Bäumer and his comrades have been given the duty of guarding a supply depot in a small French village that still has some inhabitants in it.  The deport is behind the front lines and the unit hopes for some relief from the constant bombardments and attacks of the trench line.  In the village they find everything they missed; the find actual bed mattresses with clean blankets, fireplaces that still work and chopped wood ready to hand.  The French do not bomb villages that still have civilians in it so there is relief from artillery attacks.  But most of all, there is food! lots of food, and real coffee, and cigars, wine, vegetables to be scavenged, potatoes to be made into pancakes and still-functioning kitchens in which to prepare the food as Bäumer says “a regular cook’s paradise”.  It is “a grand feed” as Kat remarks looking at several suckling pigs.  Four pages are dedicated to the food and the enjoyment of this unexpected and wonderful windfall of duty behind the front lines.  For a few days, Bäumer and his fellow soldiers almost feel like human beings again, instead of the half-starved killing machines they had to become to survive in the trenches.  Reading this, I almost felt guilty of having a big lunch.  Food – so elemental to human life has a taste for Bäumer and his comrades that we cannot imagine. 

The desperate hope to survive the war.  By the summer of 1918. Bäumer has been fighting along the front lines for almost three years.  He is no longer the young man who enlisted in the Army at the urgings of his parents and School Master to do his patriotic duty.  He is a man who has seen horror that has scared his psyche so deeply he doubts his ability to “return” to normal life.  He is not alone in this sentiment.  Long time comrades have been dying with regularity in the summer of 1918, the most brutal part of the war.  The Allied forces facing Bäumer’s unit are better fed, better equipped, and are “fresher” troops with the introduction of American and Colonial forces.  New technologies such as the tank and advanced aircraft have outstripped the German forces where the ratio is about 5 to 1.  But Bäumer knows that he and his German comrades are tougher, more experienced and as they read the dispatches, it appears that mounting an offensive will be next-to-never given the dearth of manpower and ammunition for the German Army.  Hope – that dangerous emotion warned against in earlier chapters begins to creep into the discussions of the soldiers.  There is a line at the end of chapter 11, “the breath of hope sweeps over the scorched fields, raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonizing terror of death, an insensate question: Why?  Why do they not make an end”?  Bäumer and his fellow soldiers begin to think they may make it out of war alive.  Knowing the fate of Bäumer, of Kat, of those men the reader has come to know intimately, understanding what fate has in store for them just breaks your heart.