All Quiet on the Western Front: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

Paul’s company is taken to a depot in order to reorganize and accommodate more than 100 reinforcements. As the men relax during their time off, Himmelstoss, shaken by his time in the trenches, approaches the group and tries to make amends. Paul accepts Himmelstoss’s attempts to reconcile, especially because Himmelstoss helped Haie when he was injured in battle. Tjaden is skeptical at first, but is won over when Himmelstoss gives the men extra rations he has obtained through his new job as a cook.

Paul reflects that while he and the other soldiers manage to distract themselves while they’re on leave, they never really forget what they witness on the front. They loaf on leave, Paul supposes, because they need to live without burdening themselves with any inappropriate emotions. What outsiders view as good humor in the soldiers is in fact a necessary barrier—the soldiers crack jokes because they would otherwise fall apart from bitterness. Paul realizes that once the war is over, he will need to deal with the feelings he now keeps repressed.

Paul and Kropp come across a poster for an old army performance in which a pretty girl stands beside a sharply-dressed man. They stare at the poster with longing, but with some resentment, and they rip the man out of the picture.

The men are housed in a small town, and some of the town’s inhabitants remain. In the evenings, when the men go swimming, three French women walk by the river and look at the naked soldiers. In spite of a language barrier, the men and women flirt, but each group is forbidden to pass to the other side of the river. The girls are excited by the prospect of being brought food by the soldiers, and the men make a plan to swim across to the girls’ house that night.

Paul, Leer, and Kropp sneak over to the girls’ house and fraternize with the women. Paul has a passionate romantic encounter with a petite brunette, and he hopes that the girl’s embrace will take him out of the “war and terror and grossness” that surrounds him. After a while, the three men leave, and Paul finds himself unhappy despite Leer’s high spirits.

Paul is given a pass for a seventeen-day leave. After his leave, Paul will not return to the front immediately, and will report instead to a training camp. He buys his comrades drinks at the canteen, and he wonders if he will see them again after his six-week hiatus. Paul tells his French lover about his departure, and is disappointed to see that she seems uninterested.

Impatient to leave, Paul begins his journey home. As he draws nearer to the place he grew up in, he is struck by nostalgia. But when he reaches his hometown he realizes that he cannot recognize the people he sees on the streets. He returns home, and his eldest sister answers the door. Her voice overwhelms Paul, and he is brought to tears. Paul sees his mother, who has become bedridden and sickly. His family feeds him well—Paul guesses that they’ve saved the food for months, as they have had trouble getting food.

Paul feels strangely detached from his home, and feels as if there is a “veil” between himself and his family. His mother asks him how the war is, and he feels that she could never understand an honest answer. Instead of telling his mother about the horrors he’s witnessed, Paul simply tells her that things are not so bad.

While aimlessly walking through the streets of his hometown, Paul is reprimanded for failing to salute a major. The major demands Paul’s information, and tells Paul that he won’t tolerate “front-line manners.” The major makes Paul march and salute, and Paul is indignant. Once he gets home, he casts his uniform aside and puts on civilian clothes, which are now too small for him. Paul’s mother is pleased to see him in civilian clothes, and while his father wants Paul to stay in uniform to meet family friends, Paul refuses.

Paul feels repulsed by the curiosity people have about his military service, and appreciates his mother for asking no questions. Paul worries that if he tried to verbalize his experience, he would no longer be able to suppress it. Some aspects of domestic life prove difficult, as well: tram cars sound like screaming shells. An old schoolteacher ropes Paul into having a cigar with him, and people at the table patronize Paul and praise the war effort. When Paul expresses reservations about the success of the war, the teacher implies that Paul doesn’t understand the nuances of the conflict.

Leave is different from what Paul expected, and he takes this to indicate that he himself has changed. He is put off by civilians’ presumptuousness, and prefers to be alone. His war experience has left him unable to understand how the civilians compartmentalize their lives and intellectualize their feelings.

Sitting in his childhood room, Paul longs to feel as though he belongs, and wishes for the intellectual hunger he used to feel when he stared at his books. He thumbs through his books, and is unmoved by the words he sees before him. He hopes that his disenchantment during his brief time at home isn’t enough to indicate a fundamental change in his personality.

Paul goes to visit Mittelstaedt at the barracks, and discovers that Kantorek has been given a role as a subordinate officer to Mittelstaedt. Mittelstaedt tells Paul that he has rejected the schoolmaster’s attempts to be friendly, and instead criticized him for pressuring his students to enlist in the army. He takes Paul to the parade ground, and Paul looks on as Mittelstaedt reprimands a shabbily dressed Kantorek for keeping his uniform in poor condition. Then, Mittelstaedt makes Kantorek perform several ridiculous exercises. Paul is delighted to see the schoolmaster’s role reversed.

Leave, for Paul, is “a pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.” He begins to dwell on his imminent departure. His family goes to a slaughterhouse to get bones to make soup, but the bones run out before they can get any, and Paul brings his rations to his mother so that she may have something decent to eat.

Paul goes to visit Kemmerich’s mother. She is an anxious mess, and demands that Paul tell her how her son died. Paul tells her that Kemmerich was shot in the heart and killed instantly, but Kemmerich’s mother sees through the lie. Paul refuses to drop the story, and swears its truthfulness on all that is sacred to him, simply to appease Kemmerich’s mother.

It is Paul’s last evening at home. Late that night, his mother comes into his room, and Paul pretends to sleep. They exchange awkward parting words, and Paul laments that he can no longer place his head in her lap and weep. She urges him to be careful and try his best to avoid fighting, and he asks her to get well before he returns. Paul returns to bed, furious that he came home on leave: on the front, he had been “indifferent and often hopeless,” but now, he sees himself as “nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end.”