All Quiet on the Western Front

The narrative at the beginning of this chapter is quiet and almost peaceful. As Paul describes the movement of the company, he refrains from explicitly defining for the reader where it is they are headed. Instead, the reader is almost lulled into a kind of peace with descriptions of a gentle setting: “It is a warm evening and the twilight seems like a canopy under whose shelter we feel drawn together” (29). When the narrative shifts and the men come under heavy bombardment, the effect is jarring. Suddenly, the novel has taken on an entirely different and graphic tone and the accompanying image of “the sharpness of a bayonet in the moonlight” (30) suggests the peace has been broken.

As the narrative quickens in pace, gruesome images are detailed. This includes the wounded horses that are down all around the men in the trenches. Of all the sounds and noises happening all around, the sound of injured horses, of all things, is too much for the men to bear. One of the men of the company, a man named Detering, irately points out that “I tell you it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war” (36). Aside from the obvious cruelty suffered by the horses, Detering’s pronouncement here demonstrates the men’s awareness that the act of warfare has now become modernized; the historical methods of conducting war no longer apply. It is no longer fought on horseback, rather it is fought with bombs and artillery. There is no more use for horses; therefore, they shouldn’t be at the front.

This moment also speaks to the value that the men place on the horses’ lives—a value that juxtaposes with that which they placed on their fallen comrades whose boots they anxiously wait to take. Detering’s bitter remark about the horses on the front line seems to suggest that the horses are innocents and shouldn’t be subjected to torment the way the young men themselves are. It’s an ironic commentary on the arbitrary moral boundaries that people make in such circumstances.

The chapter is highly visual, and Paul describes the setting in ways that match both the action and the devastation. At one point, Paul is trapped in an actual graveyard while a bombardment continues relentlessly. He seeks refuge in an actual grave that has been exploded so that the coffin and skeleton have been exposed. He seeks refuge underneath the coffin. The symbolism here is apparent, meant to suggest that the battlefield is literally and figuratively a graveyard. After the men survive a chemical gas attack, and the bombardment begins to settle down, they survey the carnage. Paul says, “The graveyard is a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each of them that was flung up saved one of us” (39). The scene is ghastly, but also ironic in that the men are saved by the dead, not the living. The space between the living and the dead has been destroyed.