All Quiet On The Western Front

Brandon Elmes

HIST 106

3/29/06

A Review and Analysis of:

All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

The novel begins immediately by introducing the characters under rough circumstances. Paul, the main character, and his friends have just been relieved from the front lines. They are members of the Second Company and suffered great losses on the front lines. Only eighty of the original 150 soldiers have returned safely. Despite this fact, Paul and his friends are in a pretty good mood. In fact, they are more concerned with getting the extra rations intended for their dead friends rather than mourning all of the soldiers who recently died. However, they have been relieved from the front lines--which we eventually find out to be incredibly terrifying--so their happiness is somewhat justified. Right from the first chapter, we are introduced to an important theme: the dehumanization of the soldiers. We have already seen a lack of humanity from the soldiers when they were concerned about the extra rations, but we see it again when Paul and his friends visit an injured classmate of theirs. Kemmerich recently had his leg amputated and will likely die, so he has a nice pair of boots which he will not need. Hence, Muller wants the boots. Normally it would be incredibly insensitive to ask Kemmerich for his boots, but Paul is actually able to see Muller's point of view.

The next couple of chapters take a lighter tone. Things are going pretty well, but we can already see that characters such as Katczinsky (Kat) have feelings of distrust for the superiors in the army. He talks about how when short, pathetic men are given power they jump at the opportunity to abuse it. This is another repeated theme in the novel. We see more and more throughout the novel that Paul and his friends think their enemy within their own country--not the soldiers of the opposing nations. At one point, later in the novel, Paul is on leave back at home when he has a confrontation with a superior. The superior was unhappy with the way Paul had saluted him, so the superior embarrassed him. As Paul grudgingly put up with the embarrassment, he thought to himself "I am mad with rage. But I cannot say anything to him; he could put me under arrest if he liked" (p.163). Paul definitely did not want to be put under arrest when he had just gotten home on leave.

In Chapter 4, Paul and his friends are back on the front lines where they are again surrounded by carnage and death. As the novel moves on, more and more soldiers are dying. Since Paul and his friends are persistently subjected to such gruesome sights, they become more and more desensitized to what they see. However, this is the only way a soldier can survive the trench warfare of WWI. This was the first war in the industrial era, and it resulted in bloodshed on an incredible scale. The only way for a soldier to witness this type of horror is to disconnect oneself from everything. Unfortunately, this strips the soldier of almost every bit of humanity.

In the midst of all this chaos, the author does allow one romantic concept to brew: comradery. This can also be seen as the last bit of humanity the soldiers have to hold on to. For the most part, the novel attempts to argue against the romantic ideas of honor and patriotic duty with a lot of gore and sadness--what the front lines were actually like. However, it seems that this gruesomeness is actually what causes the immensely strong bonds between Paul and his friends to grow. We see that his friends who fight with him on the battlefield are more important to him than his family or his homeland. Later in the novel, Paul is suffering from some shell-shock and is cowered in a crater terrified. At the sound of his friends' voices he thinks to himself, "They are more to me than life,.. they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades" (Remarque, p. 212).

The author uses Chapters 5 and 6 to help build this idea of comradery. In Chapter 5, we see Paul and his friends talking about what they would do if the war was over. The younger soldiers have very different answers to this question than the older soldiers. For example, Kat (who is forty-years-old) has a wife to return home to. But what about the younger soldiers? They have no wife or job to return to. An entire generation of boys, fresh out of high school, was pushed into the army by people like their authoritarian teacher Kantorek. In Chapter 6 we learn that the Second Company is down to 32 men. Paul and his friends begin to blame the