This chapter is a poignant, bittersweet reminder of what happened to Paul Bäumer’s entire generation. The front provides a sharp contrast with the home that Paul later visits. At the front, the soldiers see basic needs as most important. As Paul says, “We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted. Life is short.” His visit to the brunette is a reminder of the idealized dream girl on the theatre poster. Naked and in her arms, Paul feels strangely vulnerable, clinging to her like an island in a dangerous sea. After he leaves for home, he tries not to put the war front into words, because to be indifferent to it is what keeps him alive.
During Paul’s leave, details of the beauty and familiarity of home and family touch his heart. He is so moved by the “golden-red light,” the Dolbenberg Mountain, and his beloved poplar trees that he perceives the total picture and is moved by it “as though it were [his] mother.” Symbolically, Paul passes over the bridge that separates home from the war. His military equipment removed, he looks up at the case that holds his butterfly collection, suggesting the separation between his youthful innocence and the hardened exterior he has acquired at the front.
Taking in the sights and smells of his home, Paul cries as he hears his sister’s voice. The dirt and callousness of the front fall away, and he shows his compassion in lying to his mother about war conditions. Paul recognizes, with both his parents, that things are never going to be the same again. He can never describe to them what he is facing and his father, especially, is totally ignorant of the things Paul has witnessed as a young soldier. The gap between civilian and soldier is so immense that Paul says, “They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot comprehend.” He must lie to his mother and he must keep silent with his father. What a vast gulf divides them.
Back in his room he remembers the schoolboy he once was and looks up at his school-boy books. “I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books.” Wishing he could return to the “lost eagerness of [his] youth,” he turns away, realizing that he cannot find his way back.
The chapter’s most poignant scene is between Paul and his mother. Sensing that he will never see her again, Paul tries to soothe her fears and put on a stolid countenance. All the while he is thinking:
Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Who else is there that has any claim on me but you? Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
With these words Remarque brings home the total sense of alienation Paul and his friends feel from home, family, clothing, books, trees, houses, bridges, and warmth. This generation is one that has lost its childhood, its dreams, its faith in a meaningful world, and its concern for the individual. As Paul heads back to the training camp, he realizes he no longer fits anywhere.
