Paul Bäumer's Rewarding Experience In All Quiet On The Western Front

War is often depicted as a glorious and rewarding experience for those who fight for their country, especially when trying to recruit new soldiers. This experience is what Paul Bäumer expected when he joined the German army during World War 1 in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Even his schoolteacher urged Paul and his classmates to join the war. However, after facing the realities of war, and surviving some of the horrors, Paul returns home a changed man. When he visits his hometown, he feels out of place and cannot relate to the people and places he used to. Because he has now experienced the brutality and mercilessness of war, he no longer feels at home and is but a shell of his former self.
When he returns home,

Paul first meets his eldest sister who brings him to their dying mother. When his mother asks if it was bad on the front he keeps what he has truly witnessed from her. Paul thinks, “Should I tell her how we once found three enemy trenches with their garrison all stiff as though stricken with apoplexy? ... with blue faces, dead,” (Remarque 161). He cannot even begin to explain to his family what he has gone through because he knows they won’t understand the experiences that scarred him. Paul begins to tire of the steady stream of questions from those around him. “For they all come back to the same thing, how badly it goes and how well it goes… yet they are always absorbed in the things that go to make up their existence,” (Remarque 168) he comments on the inability of the people around him to even begin to comprehend his stories. He notices how much the war has changed him from the people that surround him at home.
Towards the end of his leave, Paul goes to visit Kemmerich’s mother and finds her grief-stricken for her dead son. She begs to know how he died, but he simply tells her he was shot and instantly died. He tries to spare her pain by hiding the fact that Kemmerich had his leg amputated before his death and that his death was anything but instant. Kemmerich’s death, and other gruesome events during his service permanently live in his mind, making him feel disjointed from those around him. By the end of his visit, he almost regrets coming home altogether. “Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless… I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end” (Remarque 185). Before visiting home, he was able to ignore the horrors he had to endure, but now he can no longer ignore the suffering that he used to and is tormented by tasks he performs.
Being in the army changed Paul as a whole; so much that he barely recognizes the person he used to be. He misses the person he used to be but knows he can never go back to being him nonetheless. “Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me, they are mere shadows and memories” (Remarque 172). As a result of his differences, Paul no longer felt at home, even when he was with his old comrades and family in his hometown. Through Paul Bäumer, and other characters and events, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque illustrates the true “glory” of war and how it is not all it is measured up to be.