All Quiet on the Western Front Part 3

    The final one hundred pages of All Quite is where the narrative truly reaches it's climax. It's really hard to pick out any major quotes, this entire section is one huge assault on morality. After Paul's depressing leave, he along with his surviving class mates return to the front but this time the action plays out wildly different. Before all the battle sequences weren't very personal by making Paul more of a spectator and detailing the scale and brutality of it all, and this is the first time where I noticed Paul to truly shock the reader with his actions. To gain information on the enemy forces, he crawls through no man's land and moves into a shell hole. When the enemy moves forward to attack, Paul stabs the French soldier and subsequently feels pain and sorrow. The story never felt as emotional up to this point

" "I will write to your wife," I say hastily to the dead man, "I will write to her, she must hear it from me, I will tell her everything I have told you, she shall not suffer, I will help her and your parents too, and your child"

"Irresolutely I take the wallet in my hand. It Slips out of my hand and falls open... There are portraits of a woman and a little girl, small amateur photographs taken against an ivy-clad wall. Along with them are letters. I take them out and try to read them. Most of it I do not understand, it is hard to decipher and I scarcely know any French. But each word I translate pierces me like a shot in the chest; like a stab in the chest"

   In chapter ten the pace is changed again, and this is where any reader can truly prove the book isn't for the faint of heart. Paul and Kropp are transported by train to a Catholic hospital where the most torturous moments of the book take place.

"A new convoy arrives. Our room gets two blind men. One of them is a very youthful musician. The sisters never have a knife with them when they feed him; he has already snatched one from a sister. But in spite of this caution there is an incident. In the evening, while he is being fed, the sister is called away, and leaves the plate with the fork on his table. He gropes for the fork, seizes it and drives it with all his force against his heart, then he snatches up a shoe and strikes with it against the handle as hard as he can. ...The blunt prongs had already penetrated deep. He abuses us all night so that no one can go to sleep."

"Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the death room is no use use anymore, it is too small; fellows die during the night in our room. The go even faster than the sisters can cope with them" 

   Passages like these define the last few chapters of All Quiet, I experienced something I don't regularly feel reading, I was glued to the book finishing it through to the bitter end. This is the read that further convinced me to dodge any possible draft.