Paul copies his address and resolves to send money to his family anonymously. He knows that he will not fulfill his promise to the French soldier. He crawls back to his trench.
Hours later, he confesses the experience of killing the printer to his comrades. Kat and Kropp draw his attention to their snipers enjoying the job of picking off enemy soldiers.
They point out that he took no pleasure from his killing and, unlike the snipers, he had no choice; it was kill or be killed. They realize that the crushing irony of the war is that soldiers on both sides have been sent to fight based on exactly the same ideals. After this crucial realization, they find it impossible to determine who is right and who is wrong. In the end, nationalistic ideals are simply tools used by power- and status-hungry leaders to seduce citizens into supporting a war that does nothing but harm them.
The war is useful only to very few men who never actually see combat. The worst senselessness of the matter, as Paul and his friends realize, is that millions of lives have been sacrificed by a decision made by fewer than thirty men. In a way, this symbolizes his rejection of nationalism—Paul has left the German ditch and entered the space controlled by no nation. This mission also provides the conditions for the most traumatic experience that Paul suffers in the novel.
War is, of course, about killing, but, from a historical point of view, the killing in World War I was largely anonymous and conducted from far away, which is one of the reasons that the war, as the novel demonstrates, has such a dehumanizing effect. Now, for the first time, Paul kills a man in hand-to-hand combat. He cannot function as a soldier if he remains in the grip of grief and remorse that he experiences in the hours after killing Duval.
SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols. Summary Chapter Nine. At night, the men go on a harrowing mission to lay barbed wire at the front. Pounded by artillery, they hide in a graveyard, where the force of the shelling causes the buried corpses to emerge from their graves, as groups of living men fall dead around them.
After this gruesome event, the surviving soldiers return to their camp, where they kill lice and think about what they will do at the end of the war.
Some of the men have tentative plans, but all of them seem to feel that the war will never end. Himmelstoss arrives at the front; when the men see him, Tjaden insults him. Paul and Kat find a house with a goose and roast the goose for supper, enjoying a rare good meal. The company is caught in a bloody battle with a charging group of Allied infantrymen. Men are blown apart, limbs are severed from torsos, and giant rats pick at the dead and the wounded.
Paul feels that he must become an animal in battle, trusting only his instincts to keep him alive. After the battle, only thirty-two of eighty men are still alive. The men are given a short reprieve at a field depot. Paul and some of his friends go for a swim, which ends in a rendezvous with a group of French girls. Paul desperately wishes to recapture his innocence with a girl, but he feels that it is impossible to do so.
Paul receives seventeen days of leave and goes home to see his family. He feels awkward and oppressed in his hometown, unable to discuss his traumatic experiences with anyone. He learns that his mother is dying of cancer and that Kantorek has been conscripted as a soldier, from which he derives a certain cold satisfaction. At the end of his leave, Paul spends some time at a training camp near a group of Russian prisoners-of-war. Paul feels that the Russians are people just like him, not subhuman enemies, and wonders how war can make enemies of people who have no grudge against one another.
Paul is sent back to his company and is reunited with his friends. The kaiser, the German emperor, pays a visit to the front, and the men are disappointed to see that he is merely a short man with a weak voice. In battle, Paul is separated from his company and forced to hide in a shell hole. A French soldier jumps into the shell hole with him, and Paul instinctively stabs him.
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