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We get to know Paul better in the second chapter. It is the next day and he is still thinking about his parents and about Kantorek. He recalls school life, hobbies, poetry writing, and observes, \"of this nothing remains.\" The older men have wives and jobs to return to; the war is just an interruption for them. But the \"Iron Youth\" had not yet taken root: \"The war swept us away\" and they don\'t know how it will end. \"We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.\" He goes on to defend Muller\'s preoccupation with Kemmerich\'s boots--Muller is just being practical, he says. After all, Kemmerich has no further use for them. Paul claims that Muller would go barefoot over barbed wire rather than plot to get the boots if Kemmerich could use them. But as things are, Muller, who does need them, is much more entitled to them than some thieving hospital orderly.
NOTE: Let\'s pause a moment. Why is Paul working so hard to excuse Muller? Does he protest so much because there\'s a bit of Muller in himself? He certainly has an intellectual grasp of the situation and probably wrote good essays in school. Look at the phrases he can produce: \"[W]e have become a waste land.\" Does he secretly wish he could translate his ideas into action as bluntly as Muller?
Another question: Remember how Remarque said in his opening note that his book was not going to be an accusation? Is it or isn\'t it? An author usually speaks through his main characters--at this point, Paul. Paul says he doesn\'t blame the Kantoreks. Judging from all you already know of Paul, what do you think? Does he truly know his own feelings? Or do you think some bitterness he doesn\'t even recognize might underlie his words?
A definite note of bitterness creeps into Paul\'s next thoughts, but there\'s a strong trace of nostalgia, too. Now that he has experienced front-line fighting, boot camp, rough as it was, almost seems like the good old days! He recalls how quickly you learned that in the army, all the learning from Plato to Goethe is less important than knowing how to spring to attention or keep your buttons polished. He particularly reviews the cruel treatment he and his friends endured at the hands of the sadistic Corporal Himmelstoss, a former mailman. Under his orders Paul once scrubbed the corporals\' dining room with a toothbrush, and another morning he remade the man\'s bed 14 times! Often the whole group ended drills covered with mud, or stood at attention for long sessions, without gloves, in freezing weather. Every rotten job in the camp came their way, but Himmelstoss never broke them. Eventually, under Kropp\'s instigation, they developed the tactic of obeying Himmelstoss\'s orders so slowly that even he gained a certain respect for them and eased up on them a fraction. How insane such training was, Paul thinks, but you can almost see him grin as he adds, how well it worked! It made them hard, suspicious, bitter, and tough--not so great for civilian life, but perfect preparation for the trenches! Such discipline, Paul concludes, was exactly what they needed as recruits.
Paul continues to spend his day quietly. He goes alone to visit Kemmerich and says all the soothing things people say about a bright future when they know very well that someone is dying. But Kemmerich knows. He asks Paul to give his boots to Muller. For an hour Paul watches as his friend cries silently. He cannot get an orderly to help when death sounds begin to gurgle in Kemmerich\'s throat. Instead the orderly urges him to hurry up and clear out Kemmerich\'s things; he needs the bed. Really, the orderly has acted no worse than the whole company yesterday, clamoring for the food their dead companions couldn\'t eat. And the orderly at least wants the bed for another man. But this time it hits Paul. He can\'t be indifferent or uncaring. He\'s had time to see what a young boy his friend still is; he\'s had time to rage at the senseless brutality that sends boys out to be killed for nothing. He gulps and leaves the huts as the orderlies haul Kemmerich onto a waterproof sheet. Paul\'s feet seem to push him forward and he finds himself feeling a strength rising up from the earth into his body. He is alive and he is glad! \"The night lives, I live.\" He takes the boots to Muller, who immediately tries them on. They fit well.
NOTE: IMAGERY AND SYMBOLISM As Paul leaves the dressing station, his mind fills with thoughts of girls, flowery meadows, white clouds. Watch for the return of such images whenever Paul is overcome by the brutality and senselessness of the carnage--the butchery--of battle.
Keep an eye, too, on Kemmerich\'s boots. He was not the first owner. In Chapter 1 the boots were described as \"airman\'s boots. They are fine English boots of soft, yellow leather which reach to the knee and lace up all the way.\" It doesn\'t take too much imagination, considering the state of aviation in 1916, to figure out how Kemmerich got the boots. Assuming the English airman is dead, the boots have now gone to their third owner--and fit him, too. Are all soldiers interchangeable, whatever side they are on? And how many owners will the boots outlast?
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 3
Reinforcements arrive. Some are older, but many are even younger than Paul and his schoolmates. When Kropp calls them \"infants,\" Paul agrees. He and Kropp strut around feeling like \"stone-age veterans.\" It\'s been a few days since the big feast, and everyone is astonished when Katczinsky (\"Kat\") produces a tub of beef and bean stew. He patiently teaches the new recruits the proper etiquette--payment next time with a cigar or chew of tobacco--but lets his friends off free, \"of course.\" Paul recalls admiringly how Kat can stroll off and find hot bread, horse meat, and even salt and a frying pan in the midst of desolation. His masterpiece was four boxes of lobster, although his friends, admittedly, would rather have had a good steak.
It\'s a pleasant, drowsy day. Kropp has washed his socks and spreads them out to dry. Kat and Paul lean up against the sunny side of the hut. In the air there\'s a smell of tar and summer and sweaty feet. The men\'s rest period is, for us, like a bridge between the results of battle and actual battle. We saw the results in Chapters 1 and 2--more food for some, death for others. But we know of slaughter only by hearsay; Kemmerich died a comparatively clean death. We have yet to experience shelling, gassing, and butchery; they will come in Chapter 4.
This chapter, meanwhile, gives us more background on Paul\'s classmates and friends, and lets us see and hear infantry soldiers at rest. What kinds of things do such men talk about? What do you think you would talk about in their situation?
Kat wants to talk about saluting. Tjaden failed to salute a major, so they\'ve all been practicing, and Kat can\'t get it out of his head. He maintains their side is losing the war because they salute too well. Kropp, the thinker, begins to argue with him. Meanwhile they bet a bottle of beer on the outcome of an airfight going on far above them. For the attention they pay, you would think those were toy planes battling up there, but the man who will die is flesh and blood.
Kropp and Kat begin to argue about the management of war. Kat wants to drop all the saluting and military drill and adopt the principle in a piece of verse he knows: If everyone got the same grub and pay, \"the war would be over and done in a day.\" The more philosophical Kropp, riled up as always about injustice, argues that war ought to be run like a festival, with such things as tickets and bands. The main event would be the generals and ministers of the two countries, dressed in swimsuits and armed with clubs, slugging it out in an arena. The winning side would be the one whose leaders survived. To Kropp that sounds a whole lot more fair than the situation they\'re in, where the wrong people do the fighting. (Maybe Remarque didn\'t intend his book to be an accusation, but it gets harder and harder to say that it does not indict the blindness of early 20th-century world leaders.)
The heat reminds Paul of the training camp barracks, with heat shimmering over the square. In hindsight the cool rooms seem inviting.
Meanwhile the German plane above them has been shot down and plummets headlong in streamers of smoke. It is Kropp who bet on that plane. Talk turns to reminiscences of Corporal Himmelstoss and basic training. Earlier, Paul had observed that little men cause much of the pain in this world. They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows. Kantorek was small, and so is Himmelstoss. Kat observes that power always corrupts officers, especially those who were insignificant (little?) in civilian life. Kropp suggests that discipline really is necessary, but Kat shoots back that the kind of discipline taught in boot camp is practically criminal. Boys learn to drill and salute, and then think they know how to survive at the front!
At this point Tjaden, his face red with excitement, rushes up with news--Himmelstoss is joining their unit! Tjaden has special reason to hate the man: Himmelstoss put him and another bedwetter in the same set of bunks so they would disgust and \"cure\" each other. Since neither could help himself, one always ended up sleeping on the cold floor. Meanwhile Haie Westhus, the peat-digger, ambles over, sits down, and winks at Paul. Paul recalls how Tjaden, Westhus, Kropp, and he himself \"squared accounts\" with Himmelstoss the night before they left for the front. They ambushed him with a bedsheet as he left his favorite pub and gleefully--though anonymously--gave him a royal beating. Himmelstoss ought to have been pleased, Paul comments ironically, at how well the \"young heroes\" had learned his cruel methods!
NOTE: AIR POWER Balloons were used for reconnaissance and observation by French forces in Italy in 1859 and by Union forces during the American Civil War. Paul later mentions their use in World War I as well. By 1914, successful models had demonstrated the feasibility of motor-driven airplanes, but it was the war itself that provided motivation for research and development of aircraft. At the beginning of the war Germany established its superiority in the air. The Fokker monoplane, with a fixed machine gun that could fire forward through the propeller blades, inspired Allied efforts. Developments and counter-developments followed, pushing the Allies ahead, and led to formation flying, aerial dogfights, and aerial bombing of enemy lines of communication and ammunition depots. Later in the novel--toward the end of the war--Paul mentions flyers making a game of pursuing individual soldiers. Still, during World War I, planes were employed mostly in support of ground forces. Development of air forces as a separate military branch followed World War I as the military capabilities of aircraft became more evident.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 4
One night the men were trucked to the front to ram in iron stakes and to string barbed wire. It\'s a warm evening, a pleasant drive, and the men smoke as they roll along. They\'re not concerned about lurching into potholes the driver can\'t see without headlights. Many a man would just as soon be pitched out and sent home with a broken arm earned that way! Kat and Paul distinctly hear geese as they pass one house. They exchange glances--another Katczinsky raid is due when they return! At the front, they find the air acrid, with guns reverberating and shells whistling and exploding. The English have started early. Kat senses a bombardment coming, and at the front his opinion is gospel. Paul already feels as if he\'s entered a whirlpool which is sucking him into its spinning depths. Only clinging to the ground helps; the earth is like a mother offering shelter.
NOTE: APOSTROPHE TO EARTH In the paragraph following \"Earth!--Earth!--Earth!,\" Paul prays directly to the earth. The name of this poetic device or rhetorical figure of speech is apostrophe. It is an address to an absent, abstract, or inanimate being. When that being is a god, the technique is called invocation. Read the paragraph carefully. Could it be considered an invocation? If so, what additional weight does this lend to Paul\'s thought in the preceding paragraph, \"To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier\"?
The men become alert animals, throwing themselves to the ground instinctively just before a storm of fragments flies overhead. It is not conscious, but without obeying this animal insight, no soldier would survive. Columns of men move past into the mist like a dark wedge. Gleaming horses pass with the ammunition wagons, their riders looking like knights of another age. Paul and his group load up with iron stakes and rolls of barbed wire, and they stumble all the way to the front line in the dark. Bombardment lights the sky. Amid the sounds of the bombardment, Paul and his group string barbed wire.
NOTE: ONOMATOPOEIA The technique in which the sound of a word imitates its meaning is called onomatopoeia, as in the word hiss. Find other onomatopoetic words in Paul\'s description of the sounds of bombardment, both in this paragraph and in paragraphs later in the chapter. What effect do these words have on your awareness of what it must have been like at the front? If you were filming this novel, how would you create these sounds?
Finally, after hours of work, the job is done: the barbed wire has been strung. Paul\'s hands are torn from handling the close-set spikes, and the night has turned cold. Shells are still shrieking and pounding overhead, and beams of light sweep through the overhead mist. One searchlight pins an airman like a bug, and he is shot down. The scene assaulting our eyes and ears is terrifying--misty, steaming, roaring hell--but what happens to Paul? He falls sound asleep! Our picture of Paul fills out: he is that experienced, old soldier he claims to be, knowing when he is in danger and when he is not. Still, he awakens confused. Momentarily, he mistakes the glare of rockets for gala fireworks at a party. He doesn\'t know where he is or whether it\'s day or night; he feels like a lost child. But Katczinsky is sitting protectively near, calmly smoking a pipe. He tells Paul it\'s all right; it was just a shell landing nearby that startled him. He sounds for all the world like a daddy comforting a child who\'s had a nightmare. Paul, in turn, acts like a kindly father when a frightened recruit creeps right into his arms. The blond boy hides his head, and his thin little shoulders remind Paul of Kemmerich. Paul gently moves the youngster\'s fallen helmet to his buttocks where it will protect him best. Moments later a new bombardment so terrifies the boy that he empties his bowels, and he blushes with shame. But Paul offers no ridicule--he just sends him behind a bush to throw away his underpants.
The bombardment eases, but terrible cries break out--the screaming of horses. Detering, a farmer, finds their agony unendurable and cries for someone to shoot them. He even aims his own gun, though they\'re much too far away, and Kat has to knock his rifle into the air lest he hit a man. The appalling sounds continue, and some of the wounded horses run berserk, dragging their own intestines. The men in Paul\'s area hold their hands over their ears; they can\'t bear it, yet there\'s absolutely nothing they can do. Finally the horses are shot and it is mercifully still.
NOTE: THE HORSES If you think back to Paul\'s earlier comments on the horses, you can see how deeply he appreciates the beauty of nature. Now he identifies their pain as nature itself protesting the savagery of human beings. To him the cries of the horses are \"the moaning--of the world,... martyred creation, wild with anguish.\" It would not have been Paul alone who saw the horses as symbolic of all of creation. We tend to use the words romance and romantic to mean love story. But in literature romantic means an 18th--and 19th-century emphasis on mysticism, feeling, and sympathy for nature. That\'s the kind of literature Paul and his companions would have been familiar with before they were plunged into the war.
The presence of the horses also helps set the time of this novel. Horses and donkeys were used extensively in the First World War, since trucks, tanks, and planes were still in the early stages of development. That\'s also why Paul calls trucks motor lorries, to distinguish them from horse-drawn wagons, which were still sometimes called, in English, trucks or lorries.
As readers, we almost sigh with relief when the troops trudge back at three in the morning toward the place where the trucks will pick them up. They make their way through trenches and a small forest, and into a cemetery, but Kat, whose feelings are always accurate at the front, is uneasy. He\'s right: another bombardment begins. This time Paul receives a blow on the head and is struck by flying splinters, but he is not seriously wounded. Ironically, it is a coffin that shelters him; the arm he feels is that of a long-dead corpse, not a fellow soldier.
Bells and metal clappers warn of a new danger, poison gas. Paul and Kat don their gas masks in time, but some of the new recruits do not. They will cough out their seared lungs in clots. History tells us that gas victim died in great pain, their faces burnt and blackened. Tensely waiting to see if their masks are functioning, Kat and Paul and Kropp scowl at the obscene stuff, the gas hanging like a jellyfish over the field. A new bombardment churns up the cemetery, as if killing the dead a second time. When the explosions ease, Paul and Kat--heads buzzing from the stale air circulating through their masks--dig a man out from under a coffin, dumping the corpse to make the work go better. They bandage their comrade, using a coffin board. They also bandage the rookie that Paul comforted earlier. His hip is shattered and they think of shooting him as an act of kindness, but too many men gather. War may be war, but it\'s still not right to shoot a man in cold blood. Two dead men lie in an upturned grave; the living throw more dirt over them. The earth may sometimes protect a man, but as Paul will comment later on, she also erases all sign of his ever having existed.
NOTE: THE INDIFFERENCE OF NATURE Earlier in this chapter Paul thought of the screaming of the horses as nature crying out in protest at what man was doing. If you keep an eye out for other comments on nature as the story develops, you\'ll notice that he never does this again. Instead, his references to nature show that earth simply covers the dead and erases their identities. It\'s like the poem \"Grass\" by American poet Carl Sandburg. Nature just doesn\'t care one way or another, but goes calmly on. Grass covers all signs of what happened on a battlefield just as easily as it covers a front lawn. In Chapter 11 we will also see how the seasons march on, paying no attention at all to the desperate gyrations of the two-legged beings struggling on the surface of the earth. Blossoms come out in spring; rain during the summer leaves the men soaked and caked with mud. Nature is so big it doesn\'t even notice man.
At last Paul\'s unit clambers numbly into the trucks, too battered to care about the insensitive men at the dressing station with all their babbling about numbers and labels. Driving back to camp, the standing men mindlessly duck their heads at each call of \"Wire\"--a warning of low, dense, overhead telephone lines. It is raining, and the rain, Paul says, \"falls in our hearts.\"
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 5
After the nightmare in Chapter 4, we\'re ready for some relief, and this chapter offers it. Remarque--or Paul--shows us by contrast how friendship can create a tiny island within the sea of death.
Once again the men idle behind the lines, nonchalantly killing lice while they talk about plans for after the war. Suddenly the newly assigned Himmelstoss appears and roles are reversed: they are the veterans. Tjaden sneers at the man and rudely refuses to salute. The others enjoy the encounter, but, once it is over and Tjaden and Himmelstoss have stormed off in different directions, they go right back to their discussion. Paul does some counting--of the twelve privates among the 20 classmates who volunteered as a group, seven are already dead, four are wounded, and one is insane. Muller and Kropp and Paul feel lost. Kat and Westhus and even Himmelstoss can return to their old jobs after the war, but what future do Muller, Kropp, and Paul have? Kropp, the intellectual, puts the fate of his generation into the simplest of words: \"The war has ruined us for everything.\" Paul agrees. They no longer care about \"achieving\" or believe in the progress of civilization. They know only war.
The discussion ends when Himmelstoss comes steaming back. He wants Tjaden. Kropp and Muller comment on ways to \"get\" Himmelstoss, and Paul observes how pitiful their goals have become. The biggest ambition they have left is to knock the conceit out of a mailman. Half an hour later Himmelstoss is back, still seeking Tjaden. He interrupts their card game. Kropp angrily points to puffs of antiaircraft fire high above them and tells Himmelstoss off: What does he want them to do? Salute and ask permission before they die? Himmelstoss disappears like a comet, with Kropp obviously added to his complaint list.
That evening Lieutenant Bertinck gives Himmelstoss\'s complaints a fair review, and he does punish Kropp and Tjaden but only lightly, with open arrest behind wire fencing instead of closed arrest, locked up in a cellar. Kat and Paul play cards with the two prisoners far into the night, but events haven\'t erased Kat\'s memory of the geese. With a little bribery, he and Paul hitch a ride to the spot. And then we enjoy the most comic scene of the novel! Try reading it aloud: Paul, in the goose-shed, battling a bulldog and kicking geese in order to steal a goose and toss it to Kat. Our formerly law-abiding schoolboy is even ready to shoot some farmer\'s dog to steal the man\'s property! But to Kat and Paul, it\'s a soldier\'s right to supplement his rations however he can. At last Paul succeeds, and he and Kat spend the rest of the night in quiet camaraderie in an out-of-the-way shed, cleaning, roasting, basting, and eating all the goose they want. Near dawn they pack up the feathers for later use. Extending their circle of peace and brotherhood, they take the rest of the meat to Tjaden and Kropp. For the moment, all\'s right in their world.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 6
This chapter opens a whole new stage in the novel. Battered and numbed as Chapter 4 left Paul and his friends, with its screaming horses and twice-killed corpses, it was only one night--a series of flash impressions of war. Now Remarque moves Paul--and us--into the deadening cage of weeks of trench warfare. In 1929 a few critics accused Remarque of sensationalizing the war in chapters like this one, of deliberately trying to shock readers to sell more books. The National Socialists, or Nazis, who were then coming to power, pounced on every mention of worn-out equipment or lack of supplies as an attack on the Fatherland. But everyone else found Remarque\'s account, if anything, an understated report on the horrors of war for men on either side. Things that we world scream about at home--infestations of rats or days without food--are simply reported as facts of the soldier\'s life. The chapter also helps us see why fighting men sometimes lose religious faith: they see only blind luck in operation on the battlefield, no evidence of the orderly plan of a loving God. For men Paul\'s age, a scene glimpsed on the way to the front says it all: brand new coffins, stacked against a bombed-out schoolhouse. The scene predicts their future and shows that nothing remains of their past.
NOTE: WORLD WAR I TRENCH WARFARE In World War I, attacks changed from those of earlier wars, since a machine gun behind barbed wire could mow down whole columns of attackers. Flag-waving cavalry charges were replaced with prolonged bombardment, followed by days upon days of infantry attacks and counterattacks. Often, both sides ended up in their original positions. Battles became sieges, the aim simply being to drain the other side\'s resources. As it became clear that this was static warfare--war at a standstill--leaders began to compute even human casualties like an inventory of shells or fuel. Any loss was acceptable if the enemy loss was greater. In the 1916 battle of the Somme, for instance, casualties totaled more than one million, approximately one man for every four square yards of contested ground.
Trenches became fortresses: above ground--barbed wire, mines, and a maze of foxholes; below ground--command posts, supplies, and damp, rat-infested living quarters. Men burrowed in these places for months, surrounded by corpses and exposed to constant danger from gas and artillery. They hoped to be wounded seriously enough to be sent to the rear for convalescence. Morale grew so bad by the spring of 1917 that mutinies broke out in some French, Italian, and Russian units.
Paul remarks that the trenches are in poor condition. For days his group loafs and makes war on the rats, rats so voracious they devoured two cats and a dog in an adjoining sector. At night the enemy sends gas; by day, observation balloons. Morale is lowered by rumors of tanks, low-flying planes, and flame-throwers. Deafening bombardment continues; the trench is cratered and battered. Food cannot be brought up. One night the men battle a swarm of fleeing rats; one noon a recruit turns into a raving madman from being enclosed in the underground living quarters. That night the dugout survives a direct hit. Suddenly the nearer explosions stop, and the French attack. Paul\'s company fight and throw grenades and use their sharpened spades like wild beasts, killing to save themselves. The fight continues into the next day, Paul\'s side chasing the retreating French right into their own trenches. They seize what provisions they can carry and clear out. Back in their own trench, they are too tired even to enjoy their booty--the rare luxuries of corned beef, bread, and cognac.
Night comes, and Paul, on sentry duty, dreams of cloisters and an avenue of poplar trees--quiet dreams in a place where there is no quiet. He believes his generation is lost, unable ever to have innocent peace again. For several days attacks and counterattacks alternate; the dead pile up between the trenches. The men search two days in vain for a crying man. The dead swell and hiss and belch with gas; the smell is nauseating. On quiet nights the soldiers search for souvenir parachute silk and for copper bands from bombs. Two butterflies settle one morning on a skull. Three layers of bodies fill a huge shell hole. Recruits in clothes too big fall like flies; a surprise gas attack kills many. One day Himmelstoss panics and Paul shouts at him until he can grasp an order and regain his wits. Haie Westhus, who had hoped to reenlist in the army for a nice, clean job after the war, suffers a serious back wound. Still, says Paul, they have held their little piece of convulsed earth. It\'s the only kind of victory to be seen in this war. On a grey autumn night they return behind the lines. Second Company is now down to 32 men.
NOTE: IMAGERY Paul again dreams of quiet beauty. He notices a butterfly amid the devastation and comments on how terribly young the replacement recruits are. Of his own group he says, \"We are forlorn like children.... I believe we are lost.\" He has felt like a child at least twice before--the night they strung barbed wire and the night he helped Kat baste the goose. Both times he awoke to find Kat there, like a father. Why does part of him long for that element of childhood? What is it from childhood that he thinks he and his classmates have lost so completely?
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 7
This chapter gives us some breathing space. We follow the men back to a field depot for reorganization. The change in Himmelstoss seems to be permanent: not only did he rescue Westhus; he has also wangled a job as substitute cook and slips Tjaden some butter and the others, sugar.
NOTE: By this time we could make a list of the ways Remarque has developed his theme: how World War I destroyed a generation of young men. It has taken from them the last of their childhood years, it has destroyed their faith in their elders, it has taught them an individual life is meaningless--and all it has given in return is the ability to appreciate basic physical pleasures. According to Paul, though, the men haven\'t entirely lost human sensitivity: they\'re not as callous as they appeared in Chapter 1, wolfing down their dead companions\' rations. It\'s just that they must pretend to forget the dead; otherwise they would go mad.
A theater poster starts a new series of events in this chapter. At the front, or even a few miles behind the lines, dirt and grime and basic survival are the main elements of life. The poster, showing a well-dressed, healthy pair of actors, reminds Paul and his classmates of another world out there somewhere, a civilian world. From history we know that civilians also did not fare well during World War I, but Paul and his friends don\'t know that; they have not yet gone home on leave. But the poster awakens desires. They try to recover that world in stages. The first stage is simple. They can\'t do much about their dirty, ragged, clothing, but they can stop the itching awhile--they get deloused. The next stage is better. That evening Leer, Kropp, and Paul dump Tjaden and swim a guarded canal for an evening with three French women. They do the same the next night, carrying the girls bread, sausage, and cigarets kept dry, overhead, in their boots. To us it is clear that the girls are hungry and do not care what uniform a man wears, as long as he\'s a decent guy and has some food. But Paul wants more; he wants the little brunet really to care about him personally.
One afternoon Paul stands the others drinks: he\'s been given two weeks\' leave plus travel time and temporary reassignment to another camp. He tries to forget which of his friends will still be there when he gets back.
The train trip home provides Paul--and us--with a sense of transition to an entirely different kind of life, as old landmarks appear, even the poplars. He doesn\'t understand why tears start pouring down his face at the sound of his sister\'s voice calling to their mother, \"Paul is here.\" Perhaps it is simply homesickness, catching up with him at last. His mother is ill with cancer, and Paul does the most he can for them, offering cheese from Kat and food from his own military rations. In the towns, shortages are acute, though his family has saved Paul his favorite dishes. One day he stands in line at the butcher\'s with his sister for three hours, but the promised bones are sold out before they can get any. He can\'t even talk to people any more. If he were to talk about front-line horrors, as another soldier has done, upsetting Paul\'s mother, how could he stand to go back?
On the whole, the leave he\'d wanted so badly is a disaster. After he reports to the district commander, some major whom he fails to salute properly gives him a bad time. To avoid similar situations he changes into his civilian clothes, even though they hardly fit any more. His father and other old men press \"the young warrior\" with opinions and questions that don\'t begin to connect with his own knowledge of war. He can\'t even gain any comfort from the books and papers in his own room.
When he goes to see Franz Kemmerich\'s mother, she blames him for living while her son has died. In a gesture of kindness, he swears Kemmerich died instantaneously and without pain, but he has seen so many deaths since then that he forgets how he himself felt. He can no longer understand so much grief for one man dead among so many.
The only relief is a visit to his classmate Mittelstaedt, who is now the commander of a reserve unit. To his and Mittelstaedt\'s delight, Schoolmaster Kantorek is in the unit! He\'s an absolutely pathetic-looking soldier. Mittelstaedt demonstrates how he humiliates Kantorek and throws his own slogans back into his face. Not satisfied with that, he sends Kantorek on errands with a model reservist, Boettcher, the former school porter, so the whole town can laugh. The scene is comic, yet sad. Even though Paul doesn\'t blame Kantorek for anything, it\'s interesting that he doesn\'t seem to feel the slightest shame at his classmate\'s behavior. Is this still the same boy who, before his last stint in the trenches, found it sad that the only ambition he had left was to humiliate a mailman?
Finally, the last night of his leave arrives. His mother sits long into the night watching him sleep. At last he lets her know he is awake. She alone has not asked foolish questions. Now she asks gently, \"Are you very much afraid?\" He walks her back to bed, choked up at her getting him good wool underwear when she is so destitute and ill. He is in agony for what he has lost and for what is happening to her.
NOTE: SHORTAGES From history we know that in August 1914 the Prussian War Raw Materials Department began stockpiling and allocating raw materials on a priority basis. Civilians weren\'t high on the priority list. In November 1914 staple foods such as flour and sugar were placed under government control, and in 1915 complete food rationing was introduced in Germany.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 8
Paul goes to his assignment, the training camp near his home town where Himmelstoss \"educated\" Tjaden. During days of drill, evening of poker and newspapers, he again notices the beauty of nature. At other times he guards Russian prisoners of war in the camp alongside. They are sick and feeble, hanging on to life by picking over the none-too-plentiful garbage from Paul\'s camp and trading their last few possessions for bread. He loves their courage and their music, and when he guards them he cannot understand why they must be enemies--just because, at some table, a document was signed. As he looks at them, he knows that any soldier would see an officer as more of an enemy; any schoolboy, a teacher as more of an enemy. But he dare not think that way too long, any more than he could tell his family what the front was really like. It\'s still his job to go back there and kill. But he stores away his thoughts for after the war. He can vaguely see that spreading the truth afterward may be the only good thing he can bring out of this war.
Recall Remarque\'s introductory note before Chapter 1--is Paul perhaps speaking here for Remarque himself? Could writing this book be a task Remarque set for himself when he fought in World War I? This is at least the second time Remarque has suggested, through his characters, that all men are the same--that only the leaders want war. Recall Kropp\'s theory for having the right people fight, in Chapter 3.
Paul\'s father and sister visit him the Sunday before he returns to the front, telling him that his mother is dying and they cannot afford the proper care. At least when it comes to his mother, Paul is not callous: he can\'t choke down the jam and potato cakes she has sent. He gives two cakes to the Russians and saves the others for his friends.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 9
Paul travels for several days and then loafs, awaiting his company. He is worried about his friends; the company has been designated a \"flying division,\" one assigned wherever the need is greatest. How relieved he is when they return, and Kat, Muller, Tjaden, and Kropp have all survived! The slightly moldy potato cakes serve for a meal of celebration. All are delighted to be issued clean new gear for once, too. But they get to keep the clothing for only eight days of drill and polish--and a visit from the Kaiser. Then it\'s back to rags. The Kaiser turns out to be a disappointingly small man (like Kantorek and Himmelstoss?) and that leads the friends to a discussion of his power. Would there have been a war if he had said no? Paul says he knows for sure the Kaiser did say no. We know from history that Paul, like many people who are certain, is wrong. Nobody directly contradicts him at this point, but later Kat observes that every grown-up emperor wants his very own war, so maybe the Kaiser figured it was his turn. Meanwhile everyone does agree that if 20 or 30 leaders had said no, there couldn\'t be a war. Kropp notes how strange it is: everybody\'s fighting for his own fatherland, sure that he\'s right. There must be something they are missing. War has always existed; it must be some kind of fever. But that is too philosophical for the others, and it is Kropp who finally growls that they might as well just drop the whole rotten discussion.
Think about Kropp\'s contributions to all the discussions. How do his ideas differ from those of his companions? Is he as willing as they to speculate that his own leaders might be wrong? What do you think the defeat of Germany will do to his ideals and emotions? Even if he survives, will he be destroyed in exactly the same way as the others?
After Kropp\'s outburst, a line of white space is our only transition to the next sentence: \"Instead of going to Russia, we go up the line again.\" The Setting section of this guidebook points out the geography: they are going west, to France, despite rumors of going east.
This time they barely notice things that would have horrified them earlier. Bodies, many naked from the concussion of trench mortars, hang in some trees they pass. They casually report the situation at the next stretcher-bearers\' post; there\'s no point getting upset. Back at the front, they volunteer to scout out the enemy position. Paul, separated from his friends in the dark, is overcome with fright until he again hears their voices. He blames his leave; it has thrown his instincts off. But the experience makes him realize that friendship is the one solid element he has left in his life: it steadies him.
In the darkness Paul is pinned down by a bombardment. When a French soldier suddenly stumbles into Paul\'s shell hole, Paul stabs wildly with a small dagger, hitting the man again and again by reflex. Then, still trapped by the firing, Paul\'s guilt and horror grow as he bandages the man and waits until he finally dies, about three the next afternoon. He looks through the man\'s papers and vows not to forget the name: Gerard Duval, printer. He has killed a man, not some abstract enemy. When it is dark again, Paul is able to creep out and find his friends. When he mentions the dead printer the next morning, Kat and Kropp reassure him: \"Mat else could you do?\" They point out Sergeant Oellrich, a sniper who boasts about how his targets jump and about how high his kill score is. Paul comments that war, after all, is war.
NOTE: That appears to be the end of the issue. From your own knowledge of Paul, do you think he does forget his vow to make amends? Remarque doesn\'t tell us; he leaves it open. Some readers think Paul is totally brutalized and that he does forget. Others notice rather that there is just no mention of Duval\'s wallet and pictures again. What do you think?
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 10
By pure good luck eight men, including Paul\'s \"whole gang\"--Detering, Kat, Kropp, Muller, Tjaden--draw an assignment that feels like soldier heaven: guarding an abandoned village and supply dump. The only cloud is that by now Haie Westhus isn\'t with them; he has died even though Himmelstoss had rescued him. Despite some shelling, life near the supply dump means real beds, excellent food, and all the cigars they want. Even when they leave, they do it in style in a big truck loaded with extra food, a canopied bed, two red plush chairs, and even a cat pulling in a parrot cage. These wonderful two weeks are the last light moments of the novel.
A few days later, while they are helping evacuate a village, Paul and Kropp are each wounded in the leg. Picked up by a passing ambulance wagon and treated, somewhat roughly, at a dressing station, they bribe their way onto a hospital train going to the rear. Paul hates to haul his dirty body onto the clean sheets and suffers embarrassment over getting a bottle for urination. On the train Albert\'s fever begins to rise. To prevent their being separated, Paul heats a thermometer to raise his temperature also. His doing so is more than just a childish prank; he and Kropp need each other\'s presence as much as they need medical care. Put off at the same station, they are also placed in the same ward at a Catholic hospital. The nuns\' morning prayers give them headaches till Josef Hamacher takes responsibility for the bottle Paul threw into the corridor, its noisy shattering getting the nuns to close the door. Hamacher says he threw it because he has what is known as a \"shooting license,\" a paper that says he has periods of mental derangement because of his injuries. They also meet Franz Wachter, who suffers such neglect that he dies of a hemorrhaging arm wound, and little Peter, said to be the only patient ever to return from the Dying Room.
Paul\'s bones will not knit, so he is operated upon. Hamacher warns some new men not to let the chief surgeon try out his pet cures for their flat feet, but in the end they consent. If you\'ve ever been seriously ill or hospitalized, you can understand their reaction; after awhile you\'ll let the doctor do almost anything, as long as it will get you out of there! Other men come and go; many die. Kropp\'s leg is amputated, and he becomes silent and depressed, but Paul can finally get around on crutches. At first Paul wanders the wards, doing so just to keep out of Kropp\'s sight (he doesn\'t want his friend to feel worse at the sight of his two legs). As he roams, he notices in how many places a man can be hit. The total image stuns him: shattered men in hospitals all over Europe. \"It must all be lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands.\" He is utterly and completely disillusioned with the traditions and values handed down to him.
After a few weeks Kropp\'s stump is well healed and he is to be sent off to an institution for artificial limbs. Earlier he would have shot himself, had he been able; now he is more solemn than he was. Even that is quite a change from the hot-tempered arguer we\'ve known. Paul gets convalescent leave. Parting from Kropp is hard, but he tells himself that \"a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army.\" If Paul is so used to it, why is it so hard?
At home, he finds his mother very feeble; this time is worse than his first leave. He returns once more to the line.
NOTE: THE MEDICAL PROFESSION Doctors are dealt a blow in this chapter. They are depicted as cruel, callous, preferring amputation to repair of shattered limbs, and too eager to perform experimental surgery. In the next chapter we hear stories of surgeons aiding the Fatherland by certifying everybody A-1. Each example is undoubtedly based on true cases, but consider also the pressures of mass operations under wartime conditions.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 11
By now Paul has lost a great deal: youth itself, faith in his elders, belief in the traditions of Western civilization. He\'s even lost much of his own ability to rise about pure animal reactions--to feel and think as a sensitive human being. Only comradeship now keeps him going, and he has already seen several friends killed or maimed. In this chapter Paul records the collapse of the Western Front during the last terrible year of World War I, and the deaths of his few remaining close friends.
It was winter when Paul returned to duty. His life has alternated between billets and the front until it is once again spring. His moods and thoughts depend on the kind of day it is; all soldiers are brothers in this. They have been reduced to relying on animal instinct to avoid death. Otherwise the madness around them would kill them, physically or emotionally. Says Paul, \"We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.... Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.\" Every barrage cuts into this thin protective shell, however; everyone\'s nerves are dangerously frayed. With Detering it takes only the sight of a cherry tree in blossom to madden him with thoughts of his wife and farm. He deserts but is caught and court-martialed. Another man, Berger, six feet tall and the most powerful man in the company, dashes into a barrage to help a wounded messenger dog. A pelvis wound kills him. Yet another man madly tries to dig himself into the earth with hands, feet, and teeth. Muller is shot point blank in the stomach. Before he dies he gives Paul Kemmerich\'s boots; they are to go to Tjaden next. (Is this simply being practical, or a premonition of death to come for Paul?) As the men bury Muller, they are saddened to think that well fed English and Americans will probably soon overrun his grave. For the enemy are sure to win. They are well fed on beef and bread, well supplied with guns and planes, while the Germans are emaciated, starved, short of all supplies. For every German plane there are five English and American planes. For every German soldier there are five of the enemy. Dysentery is constant, the artillery is worn out, the new recruits are anemic boys who can only die. Tanks are common now, new and terrible armored beasts that squash men like bugs. Things have grown so bleak that Paul is reduced to reciting lists. The men see only:
Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks--shattering, corroding, death.
Dysentery, influenza, typhus--scalding, choking, death.
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
In one attack the company commander, Bertinck, a superb front-line officer, dies shooting a flamethrower team about to ignite the oil in his companions\' trench. A final fragment that shatters Bertinck\'s chin plows on to tear open Leer\'s hip. It takes Leer only minutes to bleed to death. Still the bloody and terrible summer wears on. Weeks of rain leave rifles caked with mud, uniforms sodden, the earth an oily, dripping mass. Tormenting rumors of an armistice make the front even more unbearable. Then one late summer day, Kat is hit. Paul bandages his smashed shin and struggles to carry him to an aid station. But there the medics shake their heads; Kat has died on Paul\'s back, killed by a stray splinter to his head. Paul reels in shock. How is it that he can see and move--with Katczinsky dead? He faints at this loss, his last and best friend.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: CHAPTER 12
Soon it is autumn. Paul has been on two weeks\' rest because of gas poisoning. On leave, he sat in the sun listening to news that the Armistice would come soon. But now he is back at the front alone, confronting the future dully, without even fear. Still he believes there is some bit of life within him that will seek its way out.
And then we come to a break in the text. The narration switches to third person--someone else, not Paul, is speaking. The narrator tells us that Paul fell on an October day, an October day so quiet that the army report confined itself to the single line: \"All quiet on the Western Front.\" His face was calm, almost glad. He did not appear to have suffered long.
Our feeling is almost one of relief. In the last two chapters the misery has been so relentless that we are convinced of the hopelessness of the chance that Paul (or any of his friends) could create a good life after the war. The bitter irony is that he should have survived so much terror and died so quietly--only one month before the Armistice.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Originally published in German, All Quiet on the Western Front was quickly translated into English. At times, however, the English is distinctly British. While the words are not difficult to understand, you may feel more at home if you scan the American equivalents:
British English American English
aeroplane airplane
civil life civilian life
garden fete garden party
in fine trim in fine shape
mess-tin mess kit
Mind! Watch out! Be careful!
motor lorries trucks
munition-column ammunition convoy
pub bar, tavern
queue line
wireless men radio operators
wiring fatigue wiring duty or detail
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: IN THE ARMY
DIXIE Oval-shaped British army cooking kettle (from the Hindi degshi, a pot or vessel). The navy equivalent is a fanny.
FROGS, FROGGIES The French, from an ancient heraldic device (symbol for a shield or coat of arms) consisting of three frogs.
JOHNNY As used in context in Chapter 7 it refers to a Russian. This is similar to an American\'s referring to Russians as Ivans. Ivan, Johann, and John are the same name in three different languages--Russian, German, and English.
SKAT A German card game played by three players using 32 cards. Bids are expressed in numbers. The winning bidder becomes the player and names the exact variant of the game to be played.
TOMMY, TOMMY ATKINS Similar to G.I. Joe for an American soldier, Tommy means a British private soldier. (A Jack Tar is a British sailor.) At one time all recruits were given manuals in which they were to enter name, date, etc. The model used the fictitious name Thomas Atkins.
^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: GERMAN NAMES: PRONUNCIATION
Feel free to pronounce the names in this novel as they appear. You will have a problem being more precise, since English consonant and vowel sounds are not identical with those in German. For instance, the German sound for the ch spelling in the middle of a word is our k or h after a guttural sound we do not have in English. At the end of a word, ch is more like our sh. Also, the two dots over a vowel (called an umlaut) indicate a vowel sound we do not have in English. \"Baumer,\" for example, would be pronounced BOW-mer, but \"Baumer,\" (with an umlaut over the a) is pronounced BOY-mer. Therefore these are approximate pronunciations of some of the less obvious names.
Baumer BOY-mer
Behm BAYM
Boettcher BERT-cher
Detering DET-er-ing
Franz Kemmerich frahnz KIM-er-ish
Franz Wachter frahnz VEK-ter
Haie Westhus hi VEST-hews
Hamacher HAHM-ock-er
Himmelstoss HIM-mel-shtos
Katczinsky ku-CHIN-ski
Mittelstaedt MIT-el-shteht
Muller MEW-ler
Oellrich ERL-rish
Tjaden CHAW-den
Many critics have hailed Remarque for writing All Quiet on the Western Front so objectively, without a trace of nationalism, political ill will, or even personal feelings. Even when a character\'s inner world is revealed, it always seems to be that person\'s inner life--not the author\'s. In 1929, as noted in this guidebook in The Author and His Times, the Nazis attacked the book not on literary but on political grounds, and a few reviewers accused Remarque of sensationalism. In America, magazine and newspaper reviews immediately hailed Remarque as the new Stephen Crane and his novel as an updated Red Badge of Courage.
Academic critics, however, have paid little attention to All Quiet. German critics were displeased at Remarque\'s departure from the intellectualism of traditional German fiction, and European and American critics were put off by its being a bestseller--how could anything so popular possibly be worthwhile?
Remarque succeeded in transcending his own personal situation; he touched on a nerve of his time, reflecting the experiences of a whole generation of young men on whom the war had left an indelible mark.
-Christine R. Barker and R. W. Last,
Erich Maria Remarque, 1979.
Im Westen nichts Neues is close to him [Remarque]. It appears to be permeated with sincerity and true compassion. Its tremendous success can hardly be explained otherwise.
-Wilhelm J. Schwarz, War and the Mind of Germany, I, 1975.
...this book is an accusation of the older generation who let loose this terrible catastrophe, this monstrous war. It is an accusation of the generation that preached that service to the state was the highest aim in life.
-Wilhelm J. Schwarz, War and the Mind of Germany, I, 1975.
Anyone who was sufficiently in the thick of it for a long period, on one side or the other, might have written this grim, monotonous record, if he had the gift, which the author has, of remembering clearly, and setting down his memories truly, in naked and violent words.
-\"All Quiet on the Western Front\"
[book review], New Statesman, vol. 25, no. 5, 1929;
quoted in Barker and Last, Erich Maria Remarque, 1979.
This particular scene [the Kantorek incident], told with the malicious glee of an adolescent, is typical of the immature and sophomoric attitude of the heroes.
-W.K. Pfeiler, quoted in Schwarz,
War and the Mind of Germany, I, 1975.
Remarque is proposing the view that human existence can no longer be regarded as having any ultimate meaning. Baumer and his comrades cannot make sense of the world at large for the simple reason that it is no longer possible to do so, not just for this group of ordinary soldiers, but for a substantial proportion of his entire generation. Remarque refuses to lull his reader into a false sense of security, into thinking that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.
-Christine R. Barker and R. W. Last,
Erich Maria Remarque, 1979.
[Lewis Milestone\'s 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front] was one of the few serious attempts at a realistic approach to the World War.... The drama was kept within the bounds of its theme: a critical recapitulation of the slaughter of innocents.... Many instances were eloquent and moving indictments of the emotional and physical destructiveness of war: the sequence of the dead boy\'s cherished boots being taken over by his comrade, and the celebrated closing scene of the hand of the young soldier reaching out from the trenches for a butterfly only to fall limp on being shot.\"
-Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film.
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