Summary At the camp on the moors near the Soldiers’ Home, Paul spends a month in retraining. Drill in the autumn air allows him time to enjoy juniper and birch trees and the fine sand underfoot. The joy of the outdoors plus card games and joking with other soldiers helps […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 8Summary and Analysis Chapter 7
Summary At the field depot, Second Company takes a brief, well deserved rest. They are reorganizing, in need of more than a hundred reinforcements. Himmelstoss is friendly and, because he brought Westhus back after he was wounded, Paul is kinder to him. Himmelstoss also took over the cooking from Ginger, […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 7Summary and Analysis Chapter 6
Summary Rumors return the men’s attention to a possible offensive. As they pass the shelled remains of a school, they see a hundred sweet-smelling pine coffins stacked against it, preparations for their own casualties. Nightly, the British strengthen both troops and munitions — ominous reminders that the war shows no […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 6Summary and Analysis Chapter 5
Summary Following the desperate events at the front, Chapter 5 creates a quiet mood of camaraderie among the group and especially between Paul and Kat. As the chapter opens, Tjaden rigs up a lid from a boot-polish tin, a wire, and a candle in order to kill lice. While they […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 5Summary and Analysis Chapter 4
Summary At nine o’clock in the evening, under cover of darkness, Paul’s company, tense with the understood danger of their mission, boards trucks to travel down a bumpy road to lay wire near the front. Although they keep up a steady flow of repartee with a marching munitions column, Paul’s […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 4Summary and Analysis Chapter 3
Summary After Second Company is reduced by nearly half, replacement troops arrive, seeming much younger than Paul and his friends. The replacements are actually only two years younger, but their lack of experience makes the age difference seem greater. Kat, the master scrounger, invites the newcomers to share beans, which […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 3Summary and Analysis Chapter 2
Summary Detached from home and the normal ambitions and concerns of a man of twenty, Paul ponders a play and some verse he left in his desk and realizes that his generation has “become a waste land.” He thinks about Muller’s pragmatic request for the boots, which Kemmerich will obviously […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 2Summary and Analysis Chapter 1
Summary Five miles behind the front lines between Langemark and Bixschoote, Paul Baumer’s company is at rest. They have had very little sleep for the fourteen days since they relieved the front line and seventy of their one hundred and fifty men are dead at the hands of Russian gunfire. […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 1Summary and Analysis Preface
Remarque prefaces his novel with a disarmingly simple two-sentence statement of purpose, which clarifies that his book neither accuses nor confesses, nor is it meant to be an adventure story. The author explains that he is merely trying to characterize his generation, the young men who fought the Great War […]
Read more Summary and Analysis PrefaceCharacter List
Paul Baumer (BOY-muhr) The sensitive twenty-year-old narrator of the novel, who has written poems and a play entitled “Saul.” Paul reaches manhood during three years’ service as a soldier in the Second Company of the German army during World War I. His loss of innocence during the cataclysm is the […]
Read more Character List