Chapter 6, 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."
