Days pass while dead men accumulate on both sides. Paul
and his comrades listen to one man’s death throes for three days.
They are unable to locate him despite their best efforts. The new
recruits figure heavily in the dead and wounded; these reinforcements
have had little training, and they drop like flies on the front.
During an attack, Paul finds Himmelstoss in a dugout,
pretending to be wounded. Paul tries to force him out with blows
and threats, but Himmelstoss does not give in until a nearby lieutenant orders
both of them to proceed. They rush forward with the attack. The
old hands try to teach some of the new recruits combat tricks and
wisdom during the hours of rest, but the recruits do everything wrong
when the fighting begins again. Haie receives a fatal wound. When
the Second Company is relieved, only thirty-two of the original 150 men
remain.
Analysis
In this gruesome chapter, Remarque fuses together
all of the preceding focuses of the novel—physical repulsiveness
and gore, psychological drain, the animalistic savagery of battle—as
the bombardment wreaks havoc on the men in the trenches. With its
in-depth look at the grim reality of trench warfare, this chapter
deals with some of the most hideous historical details of combat
in World War I.
Before modern trench warfare, inventive military strategies
and sweeping victories were possible. As the endless, grinding attack
in this chapter illustrates, World War I quickly became characterized by
battles of attrition. The goal was not “victory” but rather the wearing
down of the enemy’s ability to attack or even continue the war.
The strategy was simple: the attacking side bombarded enemy trenches
relentlessly, sometimes for up to a week. The death toll from bombardment
compared to the death toll in the actual attack was comparatively
low. The Germans in particular built strong bomb-proof dugouts,
although those built later were of lesser quality. After the bombardment,
a wave of attacking soldiers advanced on the enemy trenches.
Unfortunately, as we see in this chapter, the defending
side knew that the attack was coming the moment the bombing ended.
The result was an ever-growing collection of bodies in No Man’s
Land, the space between the trenches that neither army controlled.
The major battles of attrition in World War I resulted in hundreds
of thousands of casualties, making them among the bloodiest battles
in human history. There really was no “victor” because the gains
usually constituted a few hundred yards of ground. Generally, they ended
in stalemate, with an unprecedented cost in human lives and human
suffering.
Paul’s description of the German response to the attack
leaves no doubt as to the decidedly unromantic nature of trench
warfare. Sensing the imminent French attack wave, Paul and his comrades are
able to man their machine guns and mow down the attacking soldiers.
However, they do not achieve this success out of patriotic fervor
or bravery; indeed, they have removed the blades from their bayonets,
thus making their weapons less effective, because they fear death
more than they long to kill the enemy. They are not seekers of glory
but rather men driven to the brink of insanity. They savagely kill
and maim the attackers not because they are enemies of the fatherland
but because they can do nothing else to release the anxiety, stress,
and terror of a days-long bombardment.
