Shorewood Student

Quotes from Chapter 5: All Quiet on the Western Front

For each quote, summarize the quote and comment on what is being said. Do you agree? What’s surprising about what is said? What does it remind you of?

Quote Summarize Comment
“And then what?”

A pause. Then Haie explains rather awkwardly: “If I were a non-com. I’d stay with the Prussians and serve out my time.”

“Haie, you’ve got a screw loose, surely!” I say.

“Have you ever dug peat?” he retorts good-naturedly. “You try it.”

Then he pulls a spoon out of the top of his boot and reaches over into Kropp’s mess-tin.

“It can’t be worse than digging trenches,” I venture.

Haiechews and grins: “It lasts longer though. And there’s no getting out of it either.”

“But, man, surely it’s better at home.”

“Some ways,” says he, and with open mouth sinks into a day-dream.

They are talking about what they will do after the war. Haie wants to be a sergeant in the army because he doesn’t like his old job.
You can see what he is thinking. There is the mean little hut on the moors, the hard work on the heath from morning till night in the heat, the miserable pay, the dirty labourer’s clothes.

“In the army in peace time you’ve nothing to trouble about,” he goes on, “your food’s found every day, or else you kick up a row; you’ve a bed, every week clean underwear like a perfect gent, you do your non-com’s duty, you have a good suit of clothes; in the evening you’re a free man and go off to the pub.”

Haie is extraordinarily set on his idea. He’s in love with it.

“And when your twelve years are up you get your pension and become a village bobby, and you can walk about the whole day.”

He’s already sweating on it. “And just you think how you’d be treated. Here a dram, there a pint. Everybody wants to be well in with a bobby.”

Haie is describing what it would be like to be a sergeant in the army during peacetime. He describes everything they want. Warm bed, clean clothes, and better food. He loves the idea and if possible would do it in a heart beat.
I don’t think being a sergeant is all that it is cracked up to be. After the war why wouldn’t somebody want to just go home?
Kropp feels it too. “It will go pretty hard with us all. But nobody at home seems to worry much about it. Two years of shells and bombs—a man won’t peel that off as easy as a sock.”

We agree that it’s the same for everyone; not only for us here, but everywhere, for everyone who is of our age; to some more, and to others less. It is the common fate of our generation.

Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don’t talk much, but I believe we have a more complete communion with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me orI of him? Formerly we should not have had a single thought in common— now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, and are so intimate that-we do not even speak.
The author is describing how the war has made them grow into old men at age 18. He also talks about how they value life more than they use to. It ends with the author describing a bond between soldiers that only exist in wartime.
People come home from war, changed people. They flinch at the sound of loud noises. Also they develop a friendship with there friends that can only exist in war.
Choose your own: Approximately 40 words

A distant thunder
Shells start flying overhead
Explosions all around
Men cry for a medic
Beg for their mothers
The explosions muffle their cries
Explosions continue to rain down
You can’t hide
You can’t run
You just have to take it.

I think this picture would be the mos persuasive because it shows a sailor in the wter shaking his fist at a German submarine. The picture is saying that if you buy war bonds then you will stop the Germans from sinking ships.

We were on patrol walking in single file through the forest. It was cold, wet and miserable. We were about to head back to camp when I heard a rifle shot. The Sergeant yelled for everyone to fire on that position. I raised my rifle and started to fire. Then I heard someone yell, “Medic!” I got up and ran to the spot where the man had been hit. I looked down and saw that it was Mitchell. Blood was pouring from his chest. Mitchell was crying out in pain as the medic tried to stop the bleeding. Mitchell died on that spot. I thought back to a week ago when Franklin and Allen were both killed by artillery. Back at camp I heaed some of the guys talking about what they would do when they got home. I started to think, would any of us actually get home, Alive?