e does not know that it is hard for a man to speak of such things. Baumer thinks the war is too big to put into words and the events that he has seen are too horrific that he would rather save his father from such thoughts. The home front did not give Baumer the sense of home that he was looking for. He tried to get some feeling of the quiet life that he remembered. When he went to visit the mother of his fallen comrade Kemmerich, he separates even more from that sense of truth and home. Kemmerichs mother asks him how the war is and wants to know if her son suffered. He assured her that death was immediate and he felt no pain. As he did with his own parents, so he protected Kemmerichs. She asks him to swear by everything that is sacred to him, which meant God as far as she was concerned. He did and it seemed to be too easy, but he realizes at that point that nothing is sacred to him any more. He was completely unwilling to be honest with any member of that society as well as God. Baumer searches for something that will allow him to feel apart of the pre-enlistment society that he left. The members of that world had no effect on making him feel any more comfortable, it was his old schoolbooks that symbolized that older, more contemplative, less military world that he remembers and that he wants to be a part of. He wants to feel the unconstrained feeling that he once had when he turned the pages of a textbook in a boring class. Baumer never finds this peacefulness; rather he finds the urge to get back to the war and his comrades that were still there. Remarque wrote a great novel, I would not consider this to be a universal novel. This shows the torments and terror of war but I do not think that you have a full feeling of the truth in it. Paul Baumer is a young man thrown into a world in which he thinks is a glorious thing but realizes that lies and trickery have led him to where he is. After all that Baumer goes throug...
