All Quiet On The Western Front Report!!! — страница 5

again by chance, both Paul and Kropp receive leg wounds while helping to evacuate a village. During their stay in a Catholic hospital, the wonder of clean sheets soon evaporates, and Paul discovers just how many ways a man can be killed–or maimed for life. The wards seem worse than the battlefield. Kropp’s leg is amputated, but Paul recovers. After a short while Paul is back to animal existence at the front, except that conditions have grown even worse. Starved and short of supplies, the men are emaciated and their nerves so frayed that they are prone to snap at the slightest provocation. It takes only the wonder of cherry blossoms at the edge of a field to madden one man with thoughts of his farm: he deserts and is court martialed. Another, who stoically bore the screaming

of the horses in the earlier battle, dies in an insane attempt to rescue a messenger dog. As the summer of 1918 wears on, existence is reduced to a paralyzing round of filth, mud, disintegrating gear, dysentery, typhus, influenza–and battle. Muller, shot point blank in the stomach, gives Kemmerich’s boots to Paul–the boots are sturdy and may survive them all. When pleasure-loving Leer collapses of a hip wound, all Paul has left is his friend Katczinsky. Then even Katczinsky is wounded: his shin is shattered. Paul doggedly cames him far behind the lines to an aid station. But the medics can only shake their heads. Katczinsky has died on Paul’s back from a tiny splinter of shrapnel that freakishly pierced his head. The months wear on to October, and Paul is alone. Back at

the front after two weeks of rest for a trace of gas poisoning, he has nothing to hope for. He is killed on a day so quiet that the army report consists of a single line: “All quiet on the Western Front.” ^^^^^^^^^^ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: PAUL BAUMER Paul Baumer is the 19-year-old narrator of the story. At the front, Paul’s special friends in Second Company include his classmates Behm, Kemmerich, Muller, Leer, and Kropp. The six of them were among 20 who enlisted together, prodded on by Schoolmaster Kantorek. Although he doesn’t say so, Paul is obviously a natural leader: Franz Kemmerich’s mother implored him to look after her son when they left home. Paul is also courageous. He may momentarily panic, but he doesn’t break under the most terrible battle

conditions. He learns the sound of each type of shell; he dives for cover or grabs his gas mask at the right instant. In one battle, he gently comforts an embarrassed rookie who has soiled his underpants, and later soberly contemplates shooting the same man to spare him an agonizing death after his hip has been shattered. Cool as he is in battle, though, Paul has a hard time making sense of it all. He keeps recalling Behm, the first of his class to die, and when a second–Kemmerich–dies, he rages inwardly at the senseless slaughter of scrawny schoolboys. The callous attitude of commanders and orderlies toward an individual death saddens and disillusions him. His elders were wrong–there is nothing glorious about war–but he has no new values to replace the patriotic myths

they taught him. At first his companions seem shallow to him–immediately forgetting the dead and turning their total attention to stockpiling the cigarets and food originally meant for the deceased soldier–and he is at pains to tell us why this callousness is necessary. Gradually, though, he comes to accept their approach: that poetry and philosophy and civilian paper-pushing jobs alike, all are utterly pointless in the midst of so much carnage. All you have is the moment at hand, and getting from it all the physical comfort you can is a worthwhile goal. There is another important element, too, to being with your comrades, as going on leave proves to Paul: no civilian understands you the way these men do, and nothing from your former life sustains you the way their friendship

does. These values come together for Paul the evening he joins an older friend, Katczinsky, on a goose-hunting raid. They spend the night roasting the goose before eating it, and each time that Paul awakens for his turn at the basting, he feels Katczinsky’s presence like a cloak of comfort. At other times, panicked and alone in the dark of the trenches, all it takes to steady his nerves is the sound of his friends’ voices. If he awakens from a nightmare, the mere sound of their breathing strengthens him: he is not alone. Paul gradually comes to realize that the enemy is no different from himself or from one of his friends. The Frenchman he kills in the trenches, Duval, looks like the kind of man whose friendship he would have enjoyed. The Russian prisoners he guards have the