Alienated by battle trauma, he lacks ambition and is unable to enjoy the pleasures of his youth. Paul returns home for a seventeen-day leave. The company moves farther behind the lines than usual, where they eat, sleep, and spend time with willing French girls, whom they shower with gifts of food. The thirty-two men who survive return to the rear in the fall to rest. Second Company spends the summer near the front, fighting savagely with grenades, bayonets, and sharpened shovels. Kat and Paul thwart a guard dog and steal a goose, which they roast and share with the others. Himmelstoss succeeds in having Tjaden and Kropp punished for insubordination. Himmelstoss arrives and tries to ingratiate himself with his former drill students. At dawn, a truck returns the men to their billets. As they wait for return transportation, a bombardment and poisonous gas barrage pin them in a cemetery, churning up corpses from old graves. Paul's unit, which includes some inexperienced recruits, lays wire at the front. Paul and the others, excited by news of Himmelstoss' arrival at the front, recall the night before they left the training camp, when they trapped their drill instructor in a bedspread and beat him. Kat, the shrewd, self-reliant scrounger, manages to supply his friends with beans and beef. Franz Kemmerich, Paul's friend, dies after the amputation of his leg.
In its place, they evolve a strong comradeship, which bolsters and protects them far better than the now useless information they learned in school. The soldiers, recalling Platoon 9's brutal basic training in Klosterberg, abandon their idealism as a result of the sadistic tutelage of Corporal Himmelstoss. A letter from Kantorek calling them "Iron Youth" stirs Kropp's anger. Franz Kemmerich, his leg amputated, faces imminent death. Paul and his comrades have acquired a bit of battle experience, including the loss of Joseph Behm, the first of their group to die. Paul Bäumer, a sensitive teenager, serves as central intelligence, the prototypical young infantryman whose youth is snatched away by the brutality of war.īehind German front lines between Langemark and Bixschoote in 1916, only eighty of the original one hundred fifty soldiers of the Second Company remain fit for duty. The record of several schoolmates who represent a generation destroyed by the dehumanization of World War I's trench warfare, All Quiet on the Western Front tells of their enlistment in the army at the urging of their teacher, Kantorek, whose wisdom they trusted.
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