Betrayal
This lost generation felt a terrible sense of betrayal by their parents, teachers, and government. As they looked around and asked “why,” they focused on what they had learned at home and in school. Paul and his friends feel a terrible sense of the absurd when they see how important protocol seems to be to the older generation. The Kaiser visits and all is polished until he leaves; then the new uniforms are given back and the rags of uniforms reappear. The patriotic myths of the older generation become apparent when Paul goes home. A sergeant-major chastises Paul for not saluting him when Paul has spent a good share of his life in the trenches killing the enemy and trying to survive. These examples of betrayal appear again and again in Remarque’s novel.
Parents also carry the heavy burden of the lost generation’s accusation. Paul says that German parents are always ready with the word “coward” for a young person who will not join up. He feels that parents should have been mediators and guides for Paul’s friends, but they let them down. No longer can they trust their parents’ generation. He speaks of the wise but poor people in relation to their parents: “The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.” He sees this already in Chapter One and realizes that his generation is terribly alone and does not share its parent’s traditional values.
Teachers are also to blame. Going home, Paul hears the head-master spew empty patriotic rhetoric and argue that he knows better than Paul what is happening in the war. Paul blames his old schoolteacher Kantorek for Joseph Behm’s death, because Kantorek goaded the hapless Behm to join up. And Paul knows there are Kantoreks all over Germany lecturing their students to patriotic fervor. Even Leer, who was so good at mathematics in school, dies of a terrible wound and Paul wonders what good his school-learned mathematics will do him now. Paul’s entire generation has a terrible feeling of betrayal when they consider military protocol, their parents, and their school teachers.
Old men start the war and young men die. Whether it be this war or any war since, the agony of the fighters is echoed in Paul’s words in Chapter Ten, as he gazes around the hospital:
And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, or done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all 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. A hospital alone shows what war is.
Man’s inhumanity to man
Paul and his friends become so inured to death and horror all around them that the inhumanity and atrocities of war become part of everyday life. Here is where Remarque is at his greatest: in his description of the true horror and paralyzing fear at the front. He describes the atrocities, the terrible consequences of weapons of mass destruction, and how soldiers become hardened to death and its onslaught of sensory perceptions during battle.
Atrocities are simply a part of the inhumane business of war. In Chapter Six, Paul and his men come across soldiers whose noses are cut off and eyes poked out with their own saw bayonets. Their mouths and noses are stuffed with sawdust so they suffocate. This constant view of death causes the soldiers to fight back like insensible animals. They use spades to cleave faces in two and jab bayonets into the backs of any enemy who is too slow to get away. Their callousness is contrasted with the reaction of the new recruits who sob, tremble, and give in to front-line madness described over and over again in scenes of the front.
Remarque vividly recounts the horror of constant death as Paul comes upon scenes of destruction. In Chapter Six, he sees a Frenchman who dies under German fire. The man’s body collapses, hands suspended, and then his body drops away with only the stumps of arms and hands hanging in the wire and the rest of his body on the ground. They later come upon a scene with dead bodies whose bellies are swollen like balloons. “They hiss, belch, and make movements. The gases in them make noises.” The smell of blood and putrefaction is overwhelming and causes many of Paul’s company to be nauseated and retch. The assault on the senses is overwhelming. They later pile the dead in a shell hole with “three layers so far.” This horrifying picture is grimly elaborated on in Chapter Nine when they pass through a forest where there are bodies of victims of trench mortars. It is a “forest of the dead.” Parts of naked bodies are hanging in trees, and Paul brutally describes pieces of arms here and half of a naked body there.
By the time Remarque reaches Chapter Eleven, he has described the soldier’s life as one long, endless chain of the following:
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.
