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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.\"
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