All Quiet on the Western Front

Remarque employs a similar narrative strategy at the outset of this chapter as he uses in the previous chapter where much action takes place. The narrative begins rather slowly with the men occupied in guarding an abandoned village where there is a supply depot. The men capture two young pigs, butcher them, and then have a great feast. There is a sense of relative calm, but this is broken when Paul and Kropp are spotted by an observation balloon. The pace of the narrative speeds up at this point and escalates the drama as the men try to escape danger.

This chapter is a microcosm of the rhetorical pacing Remarque employs. There are lulls which are abruptly broken by live fire and then there is an aftermath. The effect on the reader, this speeding up and slowing down, simulates to a small extent the life the soldiers live. This chapter, like the novel, is something of a roller coaster.

Once Kropp and Paul finally arrive at the Red Cross hospital, the horror of the war does not cease. Even as severely wounded hospital patients, there is no escape from it. While it has not the same terror as at the front, where the violence is extreme and unavoidable, they see in the wounded men the residual effect of all the carnage.

At one point, a wounded soldier enters, and he is so far out of his senses that he nearly dies by suicide by stabbing himself with a fork. Kropp, whose leg is amputated, becomes despondent and hopeless. There are surgeons who seem to delight in trying medical experiments on the men under the guise of fixing their flat feet. Paul associates some of these doctors with the same types mentioned previously, people like Kantorek the schoolteacher, who believe that the war is some remote, abstract event. The hospital, a place assumed as a refuge from the war, in fact demonstrates to Paul that it is nothing of the sort. The effect is that it reminds Paul of his doom, and when the chapter ends and he has recovered, he returns to it.