There were fighters in battle who seemed to be immune to the arrows and projectiles of
the enemy, and who appeared to ride unharmed into enemy ranks, always to appear
victorious. Certainly the movie industry has picked up on these figures, creating ever-
victorious heroes to awe and entertain audiences. However, although luck and skill could
sustain a soldier even in the mobile gun battles that began to emerge after the usage of gunpowder became
commonplace, it had no position in the trenches of the Great War. Here Remarque highlights
the reality of the trenches in a way that popular images of war tend not to. Katczinsky dies,
struck by a stray bullet fragment in the back of the head. His death comes upon completion of
a hard push to safety by Paul, the books main character. With this simple imagery, Remarque
portrays how shockingly random the war truly was, a situation where men simply lined up to live or die by
how the shells fall. Katczinsky was the veteran hero-soldier that Paul and his companions
looked up to for the first three years of the war. He is the sort of soldier that popular mentality
says should either never die, or go out with suitable honor and glory, saving lives or making a spectacular
attack. However, there was no room for this in the trenches of World War I, and Katczinsky
dies an ignoble death.
Also contained in All Quiet on the Western Front are Paul Baumer’s
thoughts on how the soldiers survived the never-ending onslaught of death. They
distanced themselves from the future and from home. Muller asked the other
characters at one point, “What would you do if it were suddenly peace-time
again?” Albert cuts him off, saying that peacetime would never come
again. On a global scale he was wrong, but for the soldiers who fought there was
much truth in the statement. The majority of the classmates focused on in the story
died. Tjaden, Kemmerich, Muller, Katczinsky, and Baumer all are killed, all died to
shells and random bullets. For them it indeed never was peace-time
again. Survival was a function of luck, and when a soldier’s luck ran out he
died. The soldiers would try to avoid thinking about that by talking. They
talked about everything- death, sex, whatever came to mind as long as it didn’t make them think
into the future in any way. A soldier’s life consisted of the reserve camps, the front,
and leave.
Leave was perhaps the safest part of the war, one of the few places
where shells weren’t at the very least an occasional threat, but Paul Baumer finds leave far harder
than his time on the front. The city was filled with people who were proud of the
soldiers on the front, and who would never be able to understande what things were like
there. Paul finds himself trapped into conversations with men who want to talk to a
soldier, who think they know how to win the war. His old German teacher states that
“Yes it is dreadful, but we must carry on [on the front]… Naturally it’s worse
here.