# of Words: 1031

The narrator gives us a highlights and background characters. Kat, who is twenty five, is the respected leader of the team and can be admired by Paul because of his practical abilities and gut instincts. He is contrasted with Himmelstoss (a former postman), who's largely incompetent, but has adopted every ounce of power his army rank has given him.

Paul goes back to visit his buddy Kemmerich at the hospital, only to see him die. Hospital orderlies quickly eliminate his entire body so another may take the bed, and Kemmerich's coveted boots--the military issue boots are not good--become property of Paul's buddy Müller.

Relatively young reinforcements arrive to get an operation to install protective fencing cable against the advancing enemy, both American and British troops. The guys eat well before the mission and go over the irony of their situation--people in power are idiots, educators are untrustworthy, the subject around camp is moot.

Himmelstoss accosts the team with orders. They wait to get back at him until one night, even when he is leaving a bar drunk. They flip on him, mug him, hold him down, and then literally whip his ass with a turn. (We don't want to condone violence, but the man had it coming.) They feel just like "young heroes." Along with the stripes which currently decorate Himmelstoss's bare buttocks mirror the numerous stripes on a military outfit, which can be assumed to conveying rank and esteem.

The soldiers launching into their assigned barbed wire fencing mission in the Front. Noisy jeeps, loud firearms, smoke, bomb craters, and nerve gas are all seemingly inches apart. They are bombarded through the nighttime by cubes as they race to roll out the protection cable--it is apparent that they're in defense style, only hoping to slow the rate of victory by the Alliance (the British, French, Russians, and Americans).

They complete their wiring and therefore are bombed greatly on the road. Fire, gas, and shadow accost the retreaters. Ironically, they take refuge in a graveyard, in which they toss corpses from coffins to hide inside them. It is super, super grim.

Back in base camp, both Paul and his friends smoke, eat, and fantasize about everything they are missing. Himmelstoss returns to attempt to purchase the guys around--the current struggle was his first adventure on the Front, and it has made him less reliant on the power of stripes on his uniform. But he is still habituated, and storms off. The guys critique their dead and condemn the principles of military hierarchy as they apply to the Front, in which principles are just different.

The men are attracted to a subject judge that notes Himmelstoss's petty cruelties and allows them off easy for disrespecting him. To observe, they capture and cook a wild sea.

As they prepare for an offensive onslaught from the enemy, they're accosted by rodents, which they kill in, um, inventive manners. Then they're bombarded through the nighttime, which compels the youngest recruits to mad and suicidal acts. Next comes hand-to-hand battle. They hear at night throughout the silence to the sounds of dozens of guys dying from the brush, not able to be rescued by anyone.


The guys recover farther back behind the Front, and recount the dead along with the terror of conflict. While the guys are resting up, they meet some French girls who covet the bread and sausages they provide--and we are not being euphemistic when we say "bread and sausages." Though the entire "food for gender" thought is creepy, they really all spend a tender night together.

Paul is given depart and returns home to his mother, who is ill with cancer, along with his father, who's insensitive and excited for stories of struggle. He retreats further into himself throughout his stay in the home. On responsibility, he visits the dead Kemmerich's mother and is determined to convince her that her long-suffering son died immediately. He also chides his former instructor for painting a false picture of the war as an honorable manner of protecting the fatherland. (Wow. That is additional gloomy.)

Paul is delivered to a particular training camp next to a war prisoner compound. As lacking as he has sensed in funds, he feels wealthy in comparison to the largely Russian prisoners who beg for his garbage. He gives them a few of the cakes which his mother pitched for him.
The Front has changed--it transforms right over Paul as enemy soldiers literally run him over. When amazed by one, he automatically kills him -- a French soldier -- and waits with him, almost apologetically, as the guy dies slowly. Rifling through the guy's wallet and seeing with his family photos, Paul guarantees to write to them.

The team is given a job protecting an abandoned village. They anticipate boredom. They find some infant pigs, which they kill and consume -- and then get nausea. They are delivered to evacuate a village, and also fleeing Russian households softly pass by them, heads down. On the road, Paul and the other soldiers have been bombed, and several are injured.

In a Catholic hospital, they dread the surgeons who treat them such as science experiments. Paul has a plaster cast on his leg and also struggles for the right to inhale independently. The guys are awakened from the din of prayers, and toss a jar to make the nuns to close the door and let them sleep. Paul's friend Albert is delivered to The Death Room where nobody yields. Paul slowly recovers and may walk -- and can be delivered back to the Front.

With tools scarcer than ever, guys drained, and morale ebbing reduced, Paul grows increasingly more philosophical about their passing on several levels: he ponders Youth, Hope, Order, Spirit, and Trust. A soldier named Detering deserts however is captured. Berger attempts to euthanize a dog and can be taken in the process -- as might be the orderly who attempts to save Berger. The rest of the men are hungry. When Kat is taken in the leg, Paul communicates him for miles, only to find the Kat was taken in the head and died while Paul was hauling him.

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