Paul’s character begins the war and the novel, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, as a child, barely out of school, and is sent into the most traumatizing event anyone during his time went through; The Great War, which stripped his innocence and turned him into a broken man. So, although his life was not doomed since the beginning, his mindset, personality, and purity were all doomed to be erased since the moment he entered battle. Throughout the war, he is subjected to the loss of his friends, the mind shattering effects of shells bursting mere meters from him, and the horrifying experience of not only killing men, but brutally maiming one and listening to his final breaths, torturing himself over the hours that he is trying to keep …show more content…
While the name of this condition changes nearly every war, what we call it now is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Having the threat of death be literally above your head at all times was unimaginably taxing for the soldiers fighting in the Great War. “It would not be such a bad war if only one could get a little more sleep. In the line we have next to none, and fourteen days is a long time at one stretch.”(p.5) The soldiers went days without sleep, all the while having shells pound in the roof of their bunkers. Teetering on the brink of death for weeks at a time drove these soldiers insane, many trying to escape only to be shot by their own captains, or be killed on the no man’s land between the two armies. Although the older soldiers have already been broken by the stress, the new recruits are especially vulnerable to the trauma of living in the bunkers. “By midday what I expected happens. One of the recruits has a fit. I have been watching him for a long time, grinding his teeth and opening and shutting his fists. These hunted, protruding eyes, we know them too well. During the last few hours he has had merely the appearance of calm. He had collapsed like a rotten tree.”(p.50) Paul had expected the rookie’s mind to shatter, for he had seen it happen before to many others. The epidemic of insanity spread across the entire army, and each person slowly lost their humanity from the fear instilled in them …show more content…
They had become animals, killing not for sport, but for survival. “We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death with hands and helmets is hunting us down – now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now, for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and be revenged.” (p.73) Throughout the war they had been killing people from afar, and were able to dehumanize the enemy, as shown in the quote above. However, Paul goes through the trial of having to kill a man in hand to hand combat, and immediately regretted his decision. He then had to suffer through the man’s stretched out death, without the willpower to deliver the final blow. The horror of watching a man die is bad enough, but knowing that you killed him would be hell. Paul has incredible difficulty getting past this event, and it will plague him until his eventual