We want to live at any price; so we cannot
burden ourselves with feelings which . . . would be out of place here.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
The Second Company is sent to a depot for reorganization.
Himmelstoss tries to make amends with the men after having experienced
the horror of the front. He becomes generous with food and gets
easy jobs for them; he even wins Tjaden over to his side. Good food
and rest are enough to make a soldier content. Away from the trenches,
Paul and his comrades make vulgar jokes as usual. Over time, their
humorous jests become more bitter.
Paul, Leer, and Kropp meet three women while they are
swimming. They communicate with them in broken French, indicating that
they have food. They are forbidden to cross the canal, just as the women
are. Later that night, the men gather some food and swim across,
wearing nothing more than their boots. The women throw them clothing.
Despite the language barrier, they chatter endlessly. They call
the soldiers “poor boys.” Paul is inexperienced, but he yields to
desire. He hopes to recapture a piece of his innocence and youth
with a woman who does not belong to the army brothels.
Paul receives seventeen days of leave. Afterward, he has
to report to a training base, and will return to the front in six
weeks. He wonders how many of his friends will survive six weeks.
He visits one of the women on the other side of the canal, but she
is not interested to hear about his leave. He realizes that she
would find him more exciting if he were going to the front.
When Paul reaches his hometown, he finds that his mother
is ill with cancer and that the civilian population is slowly starving.
He cannot shake a feeling of “strangeness”; he no longer feels at
home in his family’s house. His mother asks if it was “very bad
out there.” Paul lies to her. He has no words to describe his experiences—at least
no words that she would understand.
A major becomes angry that Paul does not salute him in
the street. As a punishment, he forces Paul to do a march in the
street and salute smartly. Paul wishes to avoid further such incidents,
so he begins wearing civilian clothing. Paul’s father, unlike his
mother, keeps asking him questions. He doesn’t understand
that it is dangerous for Paul to put his experiences into words.
Others who don’t ask questions take too much pride in their silence.
Sometimes the screeching of the trams startles Paul because it sounds
like shells. He sits in his bedroom with his books and pictures,
trying to recapture his childhood feelings of youth and desire,
but the memories are only shadows. His identity as a soldier is
the only thing to which he can cling.
Paul learns from a fellow classmate, Mittelstaedt, now
a training officer, that Kantorek has been conscripted into the
war. When he met Kantorek, Mittelstaedt tells Paul, he flaunted
his authority as a superior officer over their old schoolmaster.
He bitterly reminded Kantorek that he coerced Joseph Behm
into enlisting against the boy’s wishes—Joseph would have been called
within three months anyway, and Mittelstaedt believes that Joseph
died three months sooner than he would have otherwise. Mittelstaedt
arranged to be placed in charge of Kantorek’s company and has taken
every chance to humiliate him, miming Kantorek’s old admonitions
as a schoolmaster.
