All Quiet On The Western Front Part 2

   The second one hundred pages of All Quiet goes off in it's repeated fashion for about forty pages. Bombardments continue and the inexperience of recruits still perfectly contrast with the main characters' survival.

Pg 130 " They get killed simply because they can't tell shrapnel from a high explosive, they are mown down because they are listening anxiously to the roar of the big coal-boxes falling in the rear, and miss the light, piping whistle of the low spreading daisy-cutters. They flock together like sheep instead of scattering, and even he wounded are shot down like hares by the airmen."

Pg 131 "Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand. A surprise gas-attack carries out a lot of them. They have not yet learned what to do. We have found one dug-out full of them, with blue heads and black lips."

   There are many instances like these throughout the book that break the thought that every day in the trenches is just like another day at the office. After plowing through scenes where the main characters take cover under hours of heavy bombardment, the deaths of recruits symbolize what this book does so well.

   Chapter seven takes the soldiers out of the trenches, but even with this break you get a sense that everything in Baumer's perspective is in relates to the battlefield. Even with a kiss with a French girl he meets, he feels like she is a girl on a recruiting poster and is destined to win her. With his seventeen days on leave, he returns to his home but the horrors of war can't escape him. With this chapter through page 198, the book did well translating from the trenches to a "peaceful" environment, but the only problem with it was before there was no real need to soak in the story and detail, I was able to skim through the first one hundred pages considering the story's stripped down nature. Once I read through chapter seven my first time, I didn't even take in that it was taking place at a depot with the first paragraph. I was especcially confused when Paul and others found the group of french girls, however this would only be a problem with certain readers, some like myself will take advantage of the lack of real story and treat it like a massive set of quotes while others will fully immerse themselves in the text.