12 - Chapter 12. All Quiet on the Western Front.

12 - Chapter 12. All Quiet on the Western Front.  
Considered by many to be the greatest war novel of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is the chronicle of a German soldier fighting in the trenches of World War I, including the severe physical suffering and emotional trauma that will leave many unable to readjust to civilian life afterward.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter twelve of All Quiet on the Western Front by
Eric Maria Remark, translated by Arthur Wesley Ween. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain. Chapter twelve. It is autumn.
There are not many of the old hands left. I

(00:22):
am the last of the seven fellows from our class.
Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it
again proves an illusion, then they will break up. Hope
is high. It cannot be taken away again without an upheaval.
If there is not peace, then there will be revolution.

(00:44):
I have fourteen days rest because I have swallowed a
bit of gas in a little garden. I sit the
whole day long in the sun. The armistice is coming soon.
I believe it now too. Then we will go home.
Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther.

(01:05):
All that meets me, all that floods over me, are
but feelings, greed of life, love of home, yearning of
the blood, intoxication of deliverance, But no aims. Had we
returned home in nineteen sixteen, out of the suffering and
the strength of our experiences, we might have unleashed a storm.

(01:27):
Now if we go back, we will be weary, broken,
burnt out, rutless, and without hope. We will not be
able to find our way any more, and men will
not understand us. For the generation that grew up before us,
though it has passed these years with us here, already

(01:47):
had a home and a calling. Now it will return
to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten,
And the generation that has grown up after us will
be strange to us and push us aside. We will
be superfluous, even to ourselves. We will grow older, a
few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and

(02:08):
most will be bewildered. The years will pass by, and
in the end we shall fall into ruin. But perhaps
all this that I think is mere melancholy in dismay,
which will fly away as the dust when I stand
once again beneath the poplars and listen to the rustling
of their leaves. It cannot be that it has gone.

(02:31):
The yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing,
the oncoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the
melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divinations
of women. It cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment,
in despair, in brothels. Here the trees show gay and golden,

(02:55):
the berries of the rowans stand red among the leaves.
Country roads run white out to the skyline, and the
canteens hung like beehives with rumors of peace. I stand up.
I am very quiet. Let the months and years come.
They bring me nothing more. They can bring me nothing more.

(03:17):
I am so alone and so without hope that I
can confront them without fear. The life that has borne
me through these years is still in my hands and
my eyes. Whether I have subdued it I know not,
But so long as it is there, it will seek
its own way out heedless of the will that is
within me. He fell in October nineteen eighteen, on a

(03:44):
day that was so quiet and still on the whole
front that the Army report confined itself to the single sentence,
all Quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward
and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over,
one saw that he could not have suffered long. His
face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad

(04:07):
the end had come. End of chapter twelve, The End
of All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque,
translated by Arthur Wesley Ween,