12

Summer has turn into fall. I am the last of the boys from class still alive and well. Peace, it seems, is right around the corner. I am resting because I have swallowed some gas. I thinks of going home, but I cannot make plans. I have been destroyed. No one will be able to understand me or any other soldiers. I can’t help but hope that joy will return to me:
"Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. 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." (Remarque, 295)
With that final statement, Paul dies. "He fell in October 1918, on a 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 the end had come." (Remarque, 296)
* Armistice: a truce in a war to discuss terms for peace
“Everyone talks of peace and armistice” (Remarque, 293).

* Divinations: a premonition or feeling of foreboding about something that is going to happen
“…the whispers and divinations of women” (Remarque, 295).



When the situation arises, government officials realize that action can not longer be put off and they race to make amends.

I thought it was rather depressing that when Paul has finally alone and the end is near, he comes to the conclusion that there is not future for him because the war has destroyed him.