I want to open a spot for discussion here.
In chapter nine, Paul achieves his first personal kill in the war by mortally wounding a French soldier. Instead of leaving him to die, however, Paul is overcome with immense guilt and tries to make the man’s passing comfortable- or about as comfortable you can be on the battlefield.
The point of interest is the little speech he gives after the soldier dies. He claims to have finally seen that this man wasn’t just an enemy soldier, but a person with a family and a life just like him.
“Why do they never tell us that you poor devils are like us… that we have the same fear of death… how could you be my enemy?”
We have talked about desensitization and the “spell” of it being broken in class. Only instead of it happening at home, it’s happened to Paul on the battlefield. Despite everything Paul has been through at this point, has the war been made more real for him? Paul no longer considers himself a child- the war has changed him- but had he still held a certain ignorance that killing soldier killed as well? Does the fact he decides not to keep the promises he made the dead soldier subvert any sort of realization he may have had?
What I find most interesting here is when Paul is broken out of the “spell” as we have called it. He came to this moment of realizing that all the men out here fighting all have someone back home they are trying to get back to, they were someone’s son, brother, husband, and maybe even father. This snap back into ‘reality’ I guess you could say, or moment of understanding shows how Paul kind of questions the war and its intent now. To me, even for a minute, it showed the more human side of Paul and not the mechanical or animalistic one we have talked about in class.
I definitely agree with you that this scene showed the “spell” of war, or perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that it was the “spell” of the propaganda, that was broken for Paul. To me, I feel that through his internal dialogue we have access to the way he feels he needs to think (and has overtime learned to think in such way), and then we also have access to his real thoughts. Paul, who I feel can be seen to represent his generation as a whole, has been thrust into a situation that no one should ever experience. At a crucial time in his life, instead of being given the freedom to develop his own identity, he was thrust into the trenches. His options were to either mentally and physically toughen up, or have a higher chance of dying or losing his mind. He did what was told of him and I feel that from the time he goes and comes back from leave, to the end of the novel, reality hits him harsher than any propaganda can. With that in mind, back on the front, he has to ignore what he has come to learn about reality and shift back into a soldier mentality. It is not until he is isolated, with only the dying soldier he attacked as company, that he is allowed to act on and allow himself to analyze the reality of the situation. In this scene, just as others have already pointed out, he is finally allowed to be (and feel) human.
I totally agree with you Meaghan. It’s almost as if in this scene Paul is given the go-ahead to de-mechanize himself–to become human again.