Remarque demonstrates a mastery of language, which he manipulates to suit rapid shifts of tone, characterization, and theme, depending on his varying needs for graphic, blunt description, lyricism, dialogue, or lament. Passages illustrating these rhetorical devices are listed in the following sections.
Humor
* “Then [the sergeant major] steams off with Himmelstoss in his wake.”
* “My arms have grown wings and I’m almost afraid of going up into the sky, as though I held a couple of captive balloons in my fists.”
Personification
* “The wind plays with our hair; it plays with our words and thoughts.”
* “Darknesses blacker than the night rush on us with giant strides, over us and away.”
* “Over us Chance hovers.”
Euphemism
* “At the same time he ventilates his backside.”
* “All at once he remembers his school days and finishes hastily: ‘He wants to leave the room, sister.’”
Imagery
* “To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever.”
* “The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen.”
* “I recognize the characteristic outline of the Dolbenberg, a jagged comb, springing up precipitously from the limits of the forests.”
Repetition
* “Earth!—Earth!—Earth!”
* “Dawn approaches without anything happening—only the everlasting, nerve-wracking roll behind the enemy lines, trains, trains, lorries, lorries; but what are they concentrating?”
