Summary
Paul reports to the training camp. Next to the camp is
a prison for captured Russian soldiers, who are reduced to picking
through the German soldiers' garbage for food. Paul can hardly understand
how they find anything in the garbage: food is so scarce that everything
is eaten. When he looks at the Russian soldiers, Paul can scarcely believe
that these men with “honest peasant faces” are the enemy. Nothing
about them suggests that he is fundamentally different from them
or that he should have any reason to want to kill them. Many of
the Russians are slowly starving, and they are stricken with dysentery
in large numbers. Their soft voices bring images of warm, cozy homes
to Paul's mind. But most people simply ignore the prisoners' begging,
and a few even kick them.
The spirit of brotherhood among the prisoners touches
Paul deeply. They live in such miserable circumstances that there
is no longer any reason for them to fight among themselves. Paul
cannot relate to them as individual men because he knows nothing
of their lives; he only sees the animal suffering in them. People
he has never met, people in positions of influence and power, said
the word that made these men his enemy. Because of other men, he
and they are required to shoot, maim, imprison, and kill one another.
Paul pushes these thoughts away because they threaten his ability
to maintain his composure. He breaks all of his cigarettes
in half and gives them to the prisoners. One of the prisoners learns
that Paul plays the piano. The prisoner plays his violin next to
the fence. The music sounds thin and lonely in the night air, and
only makes Paul feel sadder.
Before Paul returns to the front, his sister and father
visit him. Their time together is as uncomfortable as it had been
at home during Paul's leave, and they cannot find anything to talk
about except his mother's illness. The hours are an agony for them.
Paul's mother has been taken to the hospital to be treated for her
cancer. His father says that he did not even dare to ask the hospital
what the operation would cost because he feared that the doctors
would not perform the surgery if he did.
Before they leave, Paul's father and sister give Paul
some jam and potato cakes that his mother made for him. Depressed,
Paul has no appetite for them, and ponders whether to give them
to the hungry Russian prisoners. He decides that he will, but then
he remembers that his mother must have been in pain when she made
the cakes and that she meant them for him. He compromises by giving
the prisoners two of the cakes.
Analysis
Paul's experience with the Russian prisoners in this chapter
is one of Remarque's most powerful attacks on the patriotic, nationalistic ideals
of the war. During World War I, nationalistic spirit drove the armies
of several countries into unprecedented levels of carnage. The leaders
of the warring nations disseminated propaganda to their citizens
declaring a fundamental difference between themselves and the enemy.
When Paul sees the Russians, however, they do not appear to be part
of an abstract force that threatens his fatherland. They seem simply
to be suffering individuals, and Paul cannot see them as his enemies.
They remind him of German peasants and seem no different and no
less human. He realizes, however, that when these prisoners were
free they were no doubt ordered to kill German soldiers like himself.
Remarque implies that the shared experience of humanity is more
basic and more morally relevant than the arbitrary classifications
of nationalism.
While the rhetoric of politics makes no sense to Paul,
the rhetoric of music does. Though he knows nothing specific about
the Russian prisoners' lives, he understands the comradeship of
suffering, something that he himself has experienced in the trenches.
Aware that Paul, too, is a musician, the Russian prisoner attempts
to communicate with him via a mutually comprehensible language of
emotion. His plaintive violin music touches Paul—one of the few
instances in which Paul displays emotion—reinforcing Remarque's
proposition that there is something universal in human existence
that outweighs all perceived differences between people.
In advancing this argument, this chapter again looks at
the role of political power in initiating military conflict and
concludes that the powerful people who decide to wage war are the
common soldier's real enemies. Paul reflects that he and the Russian
prisoners are supposed to be enemies simply because other people
more powerful than he and the prisoners decreed it so, not because
of anything intrinsic to Paul, the Russians, or their relationship.
Someone else decided that they had to shoot, kill, and torture one
another, denying one another's humanity and finally destroying their
own.
Before he takes this thought too far, Paul quickly flees
it, driven again by the necessity of keeping himself detached from
the full force of his feelings. He knows that if he thinks too deeply
about the causes of participation in the war, his thoughts will
only make the senselessness of everything that he has experienced
all too apparent. The idea of acknowledging that the war is meaningless
threatens Paul's last reserve of hope. He decides to save his thoughts
for a later time because he cannot afford the psychological damage
that they would cause him now.
Paul's interaction with his father and sister in this
chapter further illustrates that his experience in the war has alienated
him from his past. Paul remains unable to resume his previous relationship
with his family because the war has damaged his innocence and given him
a new mindset that his family cannot possibly understand. In these
scenes, Remarque essentially retreads the thematic material that
he covers during Paul's visit home earlier in the novel. But he also
demonstrates that the trauma Paul has suffered during the war has
made it impossible for him to confront his feelings of loss, fear, and
grief about his mother's illness; his worry for his mother is counterbalanced
by the necessity of keeping his feelings at bay. At the same time,
Remarque continues to emphasize Paul's essential goodness, showing
his feelings of compassion in his decision to give the potato cakes
to the prisoners and in his realization that the cakes should mean
something to him since the effort that his ailing mother put into
making them constituted a sacrifice.
