Chapter 2 provides a study in contrasts. On the one hand, Paul describes eloquently his “lost generation,” and, on the other hand, he explains the hardening regimen that not only causes them to lose their innocence but also prepares them to survive at the front. The poignant scene with Kemmerich at the end of the chapter is a surviving indication of faith in man’s humanity.
Paul continues to describe how “Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand.” He compares his comrades to the older generation who have already lived their middle age with homes, wives, families, and vocations. Paul and his peers have hardly even begun and, “in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.” Their heads were filled with romance and ideals, and they would never survive at the front with that education alone.
Unfortunately for Paul and his friends, fate intervenes in the person of Colonel Himmelstoss. Although the sadistic officer puts them through their well-described paces, he also teaches them more about survival in ten weeks than they ever learned in ten years of school. In their practical and chaotic world at the front, “a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer.” So much for the schoolbooks; they learn to fight back in more subtle ways and become “hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough.” This hardening regimen may seem cruel and senseless, but it prepares them for life at the front. The introduction of Himmelstoss is also important because he will later cross their paths in a very different way.
In the strange manner that life has of providing light out of darkness, Paul’s battle with Himmelstoss elicits a value that Remarque continues to show throughout the novel. The brighter side of warfare is the comradeship that often develops in death-defying situations. As Paul says, a far more important lesson of their struggle is that “it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war—comradeship.”
The poignant scene with Kemmerich in the hospital expands on the theme of companionship and evokes a faith in man’s ability to care for his fellow man. Both men face reality, Kemmerich handing over his boots and Paul realizing that Kemmerich has only a few hours left. Paul nostalgically reflects on his childhood memories of Kemmerich, comparing him to a child even now. Unable to let his friend die alone, Paul cradles him in his arms and watches him silently cry as his life leaves him. But not one to wallow in self-pity, Remarque effectively undercuts this touching picture with the overworked and harsh doctor, who says he has amputated five legs that day and presided over sixteen deaths, and with the orderly who demands Kemmerich’s bed immediately. The brutal picture of Franz hauled out on a waterproof sheet slices through the sadness of his last minutes. Paul collects Kemmerich’s belongings, unties his identification tag, and delivers his boots to Müller. A moment of human kindness has been replaced with the cold, raw reality of death in war.
