Chapter Six, one of the most brutal, graphic episodes, tests the men’s mettle as they battle for a few yards of turf while living in vermin-ridden dugouts surrounded by hissing, gaseous cadavers. Despite Paul’s friend’s black humor about the coffins, the soldiers despair as Germany fails to overcome Allied forces. Paul, weighed down by combat, mentions the poplar trees, a strangely graceful, nonthreatening antithesis to the worn-out guns, which are so inaccurate that they endanger German troops. The repugnant motif of rat-hunting replicates the human image of men living in foxholes and scrabbling for food. The ignoble death of rats trapped in the gleam of a flashlight calls to mind the airman who is trapped by searchlights and gunned down. Just as Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest predicts, the rats that survive are the most aggressive—bloodthirsty enough to devour a couple of cats and a dog.
Seemingly, even warfare has no limits, as demonstrated by the savage Allied response to saw-edged bayonets, with which they mutilate German soldiers, strangling them with sawdust. The men, disenchanted with dependence on bayonets, rely on multipurpose spades, which can cleave “as far down as the chest.” The detached tone of Paul’s recitation of how to assault an aggressor evidences his immersion in self-preservation at any cost. Only twenty years old, he is already a grim mercenary capable of killing all adversaries, even if his “own father came over with them.”
The counterpoint of Paul’s stint of guard duty heightens the sense of loss as he tries to summon former feelings of love, innocence, and optimism, but cannot fully override the distant sound of artillery fire that triggers his siege mentality. His wistful, elegiac mood persists, forcing him to accept the fact that his generation is burned out, indifferent, emotionally stifled. He recognizes that he can go on existing, but that he will never feel fully alive again. Regretting the loss of his former self, he concludes, “I believe we are lost.”
Paul’s inability to warm his hands parallels the deaths of his comrades and foreshadows his own coming death. He decries the pitiless landscape, so pockmarked by craters that it resembles the moon, a cold heavenly body. Unable to solace his flagging spirits, he looks forward to a mug of barley soup, but the meal fails to brighten his mood. Even with blue skies and gentle breezes overhead, the earthly scene of rotting, bloated corpses sickens the men, who are incapable of interring so many dead comrades. Against this hellish backdrop flutter larks and two yellow and red butterflies, symbols of fragile beauty, which settle on the “teeth of a skull.” Likewise Paul and his comrades, at one time innocent denizens of nature, perch on the rim of death, because they have no other place to rest.
Ironically, Paul, himself childlike under the tutelage of Kat, loses patience with ignorant recruits, whose presence indicates that German draft boards lack adult males to restock the fighting force. When recruits endanger themselves, Paul, playing the role of disapproving father, wants to spank them and “lead them away from here where they have no business to be.” Poisonous gas leaves them hemorrhaging from ravaged lungs, and they soon die. Haie’s injury, which bares a quivering lung, denies Paul the opportunity to bandage and rescue his friend. Haie, familiar with the odds against remaining alive, accepts his fate.
