The first chapter of All Quiet on the Western Front sets the tone quietly for the violent and often gruesome story to follow. Remarque takes us away from the action long enough to introduce the characters and setting, produce the initial tone of the narrator, set in motion various themes to be illustrated shockingly, and string together a group of symbols that will be amplified.
The characters and setting are introduced through the eyes of the novel's narrator. Paul's comrades are partly school chums who spent many years together reading books, studying, and listening to their teachers. Paul ponders on Müller, with his textbooks of science and mathematics. Where will those textbooks take Müller in this war? Then there is Kropp, the quiet, thoughtful boy; these personal characteristics are hardly good ones for a hardened soldier. And Behm certainly represents the slaughter of the innocent, already lost to impractical dreams. Paul thinks about the girls and the dances that might have been. In fact, when Paul goes home later, he realizes these memories are from another time and another world. Germany, outmanned and outpaced by better-supplied Allied forces, struggles to hold on to slender gains, purchased at the price of thousands of dead and wounded men.
