第 8 页

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!

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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.

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CHAPTER_4

CHAPTER 4

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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.

-

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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"?

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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.

-

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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?

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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.

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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