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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 127
closing scenes. Everywhere there is apathy mixed with a sickened determination to fight to the bitter finish. The end comes rapidly after Kat's death, and it is beautifully done. Cross-cutting between Paul, unconscious of the conflict around him as he puts out his hand to touch a butterfly settled on the bare earth, and a French sniper taking accurate aim through the telescopic sights of his rifle, we watch for the inevitable to happen. The only sound is a distant mouth-organ. It seems an age as we wait. It seems a century. We long to shout and warn Paul. The sniper makes his final adjustment to a hair's breadth. We see Paul's hand, the butterfly, and the bare earth. Suddenly, without warning, the silence is rent as if by the lash of a whip. The spang of a broken piano wire. A sound precisely the opposite of what we expected. Paul's hand jerks back. It is over.1
I wish it were. But, ten thousand pities, it is not. The final shot of the film utterly shatters what has just gone before. It is a shot, taken from earlier in the film, of the soldiers whose lives we have followed. They are marching away from us, glancing back over their shoulders, whilst below them is superimposed a battlefield of crosses. It conforms, as can be seen, with all that we have previously associated with Universal.
I understand two endings to All Quiet on the Western Vront were made, the one by Milestone and the other by Carl Laemmle Junior. Milestone's idea was to show thousands of newspapers rising from a
1 I understand that the hand, supposedly of Paul Baumer, in this shot is actually that of Lewis Milestone, who was determined to take part under his own direction.