Loss of
Hope
Chapter
6
As the
war goes on, it is obvious that the boys are losing hope. It’s actually ironic
because the German military is partly responsible for this feeling. You would
think that the boys would be encouraged to keep fighting hard and strong.
However, as they arrive to the front, the first thing the men see is a
schoolhouse, shelled and destroyed. Lined up in front of it are new coffins,
coffins that they know were made for their bodies. The men have to joke with
each other about this saying, “You be thankful if you get so much as a coffin”
(Remarque 99), for they know that if they don’t joke about it, they might break down
in a rage of anger and fear. They wonder how the military could dare do this to
them. They have prepared for many deaths. They don’t know what it is really
like out on the front or how hard it is. The last thing the men need is a
discouraging message.
Their own weapons
are even a cause to lose hope. The guns that they are using are worn out, much
like the men themselves. The barrels don’t hold the shells very well, so some
of the bullets are coming back at them, injuring their own troops. At this
point, it seems as though they are even fighting against themselves.
Paul also talks about Chance. Chance is capitalized, like
a name, because it plays a very significant role in their lives, like a person.
Chance basically controls the men’s lives now. All they can do is depend on
Chance to keep them alive during this war. Paul says, “Over us, Chance hovers”
(Remarque 101). It’s as if Chance is always there, watching and preying like a big
bully. They cannot escape its grasp. Chance will either destroy them or keep
them alive.
“No
soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and
trusts his luck” (Remarque 101). It’s now all a matter of being at the right place
at the right time, and that is simply the men’s view on the war. It is no
longer in their control, so the only thing that they can do is wait for Chance
to get to them. They don’t believe they will really survive the war, because
they’ve seen so many of their comrades killed in battle. Even if they survive physically,
they will still be in a completely different state mentally and emotionally. It
is impossible for them to regain their youth or be the same people they were
before the war. They are long gone from what they used to be.
Another place where we see loss of hope is through the
new recruits. The bombardment is too much for these new recruits who are young and
unprepared. They may have gone through training, but nothing except time and
experience really could have prepared them for the front. They get claustrophobic
very easily during the bombardment. They obviously aren’t used to these
conditions. The Germans are losing the war, and this shows in the new recruits.
They are dying in greater numbers and slowing the older recruits down because
of their limited training. The German military is losing men so quickly that
they don’t even have enough time to train the replacements properly.
The new
recruits are still innocent because they haven’t been through nearly as much.
They aren’t exactly changed by the war yet, so the front is something of a
shock to them. Waiting for days during the bombardment, seeing men and comrades
die in front of their eyes, killing the enemy, it all has such an effect on
these young soldiers. They are clearly overwhelmed.
Even Himmelstoss,
the ruthless officer, is scared. Paul catches him trying to escape the front by
pretending to be hurt. This shows how no one really knows what the war is like
unless they experience battle firsthand. Evidently, Himmelstoss does not
enjoy it as much as he enjoys being the one in control.
We can see that the war isn’t really getting anywhere. It
goes back and forth between the Germans and the French in somewhat of a
stalemate. The bodies just keep building up in No Man’s Land, yet they stay
there. At this point, the men have accepted defeat and are only fighting to
keep themselves alive as best they can. They become savage, but it is only for
their own protection. They don’t realize what they’re doing, killing other
innocent human beings. Paul even says, “If your own father came over with them
you would not hesitate to fling a bomb at him” (Remarque 114). Killing has become
more of an instinct and a reaction for the men. They are more concerned about
dying rather than killing the enemy.
There are only thirty-two men left in the Second Company
at the end of this trip to the front. The number alone is enough to discourage
the men. They went from having one hundred fifty men, down to eighty, and now
only thirty-two. As they are leaving,
the Company Commander asks, “Is that all?” and then tells them, “Second
Company-march easy!” (Remarque 136). Even he is surprised at this small number. They
form a very short line of worn out, tired men who have lost hope.
The Real Enemy
Chapters
8 & 9
In
Chapter 8, Paul goes to a training camp on the moors. When he first arrives,
although he has been there before, he feels lonely and spends a lot of his time
by himself. Right next to his camp is a Russian prison camp. It is there that
he finds comfort.
All
Paul has heard about the enemy has been propaganda. However, when he first sees
the Russians, he compares them to St. Bernard dogs. They aren’t as scary or
different as he has been told. They may not usually look it, but they are actually
rather frail and vulnerable, at least in this situation. The Russians fear the
Germans just as the Germans fear their “enemy” in this war, and all that they
knew about each other up until now was false information.
Paul never describes the Russians as
mean or bad people, like he thought prior to now. Instead, he describes them as
caring and brotherly to one another. Even their voices reflect this; they are
“like warm stoves and cozy rooms at home” (Remarque 190). They seem to be familiar
to Paul in many ways.
Paul begins to
realize how alike they all are. They are all in the same situation, and he
begins to feel bad for them. The starving men must forage through the garbage
to find food. Paul himself has been in a similar situation before, hungry with
nothing to eat. He can easily relate to these men on the other side of the
fence, so he helps them by giving them food and cigarettes.
He has never seen
the enemy’s troops so close before. He is used to blindly shooting and killing
them, not really knowing anything about them. Paul starts to think that maybe
the Russians aren’t the real enemy. He doubts his old views and previous
judgments of them. He starts to wonder why anyone is fighting this war at all,
since he can’t find a purpose anymore. No one who is doing the fighting
actually cares about killing the enemy. Again, they are only fighting for their
own survival, and the wrong people are dying.
For a long time,
Paul wonders who the real enemy is in this war. The people that started it, the
rulers, are the enemy to him. If they had not had a disagreement in the first
place or just solved the conflict for themselves, then innocent men would not
be dying. If there wasn’t so much greed in the world, all would be peaceful.
Paul doesn’t understand why everyone continues to fight someone else’s war.
However, he has to stop himself from thinking these things before he gets to a
point where he is incapable of fighting anymore. He has to go on fighting, or
else he will die.
In Chapter 9, Paul
goes back to the front. He realizes how hard it is to kill now. The action of
killing isn’t hard for him to do, but the result significantly affects him. He
kills a French soldier who had jumped into the same trench as him. He did it
out of pure protection, but he soon wishes he hadn’t.
Paul watches the
man as he slowly dies, and he tries to help the man as best as he can. It’s
hopeless. The dying man makes Paul feels worse and worse about himself. He
says, “But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he
has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts” (Remarque 221).
Paul feels the same pain that the man does, a pain of realization. The man
knows he is going to die, and Paul knows that he destroyed a life which can
never be taken back.
He starts to
wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t killed the man. He imagines the
man’s life. The man has a family somewhere back home, just like Paul. Paul
finds a picture in the man’s wallet of his daughter and wife. He suffers with
the thought that he just widowed a woman and made a young girl fatherless. He
wants to write to them, to tell them that he’s sorry. He talks to the dead man
because it is all he can do to keep himself from going crazy.
All the numbness
that Paul had towards death is gone in this moment. He realizes the magnitude
of his actions and the long list of effects it brings. Paul truly hates the war
now that he has seen the other side of it, the so called “enemy,” but he
realizes just how similar the two sides really are. The real enemy is no longer
the people that he is told to fight.
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