This chapter, one of the most dramatic in the book, depicts how Paul reacts to the intense fighting along the western front. As Remarque’s most pointed explanation of how war reduces combatants to simple survival skills, the section contains reminders that humanitarianism and compassion quickly return, impelling the men to help the wounded and dying and to commiserate with maimed horses. Like animals themselves, the men cling to the earth in shell holes, trenches, and dugouts, foreshadowing their own burials, as well as the cemetery battle scene. As Paul notes, if fate proves false, the earth will receive them forever.
The consciousness of the front and its terrors streams through this chapter in Paul’s thoughts. He says “there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses.” This new consciousness is compared to the instincts of animals in fight-or-flight mode. All are changed from the relatively carefree soldiers they were in Chapter Three, or even from the stillness and peace of the ride in the lorries they experienced just moments ago.
Like a machine, the men become mere cogs in the wheel of war. They are part of a greater drama in which they are mere bodies. Even as they drive to the front, Paul himself feels sucked into this nightmare. He feels the front is “a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.”
Man’s inhumanity is stressed throughout this surreal nightmare. The screaming horses are like nature itself crying out at the actions of mankind. Euthanasia seems a fitting end for the horses as well as for the young recruit, whose life is shattered like his hip and arm. Both horse and man are but numbers in a huge battle that knows neither identities nor names. As Kat remarks that the young recruit is such “an innocent,” Remarque seems to be commenting on the entire “lost generation” of this war.
Nature is also a key actor in this chapter. The earth becomes spiritually connected to mankind, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” It is a refuge from the shelling, a site of horrifying death from gas, and a final resting place for literally thousands of nameless bodies that once were boys with names. Paul’s description is an invocation to earth’s refuge from the annihilation of man: “Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life.” And even as nature shelters mankind, it also cleans up after him. When the battle is over, the rain comes to wash away the blood and the tears. As Paul says, “It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s grave; it falls in our hearts.”
