90 pages • 3-hour read
All Quiet on the Western Front
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Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
Paul is now at the camp on the moors for training rather than a return to the front. He mentions that near the camp there are Russian prisoners of war, and he reflects humanely on their dire condition. They are extremely hungry and desperate. Paul’s fellow soldiers mistreat them, and Paul recognizes the inhumanity shown to these men, who much like many of the German soldiers, are most likely peasants, too. As Paul begins to sympathize with them, he suddenly realizes the flaw in this kind of thinking. In order for him to survive the war, he must regard them as his mortal enemy, and so he stifles the sympathy he begins to feel.
While at the camp, Paul’s father and sister visit him. Once again, Paul is speechless and has a difficult time communicating with them. They talk about his mother, whose prospects of surviving cancer are increasingly bleak. In the discussion with his father, Paul reveals the problems faced by those of his social class. The cost of his mother’s operation is a cause of great concern for Paul’s father, but not much can really be done about it. The bitterness of Paul’s voice is apparent when he mentions how people of better means don’t have to worry about asking for the price of things—only poor people do.
As the chapter concludes, Paul has given some of his mother’s homemade jam to the Russian prisoners. It’s an act of mercy and humanity that only lasts as long as the realization that the jam was a gift from his mother who probably worked through literal pain to make it for him.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Chapter 8 primarily explores the nature of mercy and sympathy, how it is a human tendency, and how the war strips it from those fighting. At the camp on the moor where Paul has been stationed after completion of his leave, there is a Russian prisoner camp. Paul chronicles the dire conditions that these men face, which include abject filth and starvation. The way the prisoners are treated is inhumane by modern standards. As Paul notices the men’s habits more and more, he recognizes in them their own humble backgrounds. Like the many soldiers fighting for the German side, these men are also from peasant upbringings. Paul says, “They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland” (103) and recognizes they have a shared fate. In fact, Paul directs very little explicit animosity at the enemy throughout his entire narrative.
Despite the sympathy Paul feels for these prisoners, he likewise recognizes how this feeling could lead him to disaster and death. He cannot allow himself to think this way, to see himself in his enemy. Paul states, “I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men,” but he almost immediately realizes that “this way lies the abyss” (105). While sympathy and the recognition of suffering in others are noble in life, in war both are dangerous emotions. Importantly though, Paul compartmentalizes the feeling and affirms to himself that though he must bury these sentiments somewhere deep in his psyche, he “will not lose these thoughts” (105).
The affirmation moves Paul, and he has an actual physical reaction to them. He is uplifted, and he is motivated by something other than a violent necessity to kill to stay alive. In light of his experiences on leave, when he feels entirely lost and disconnected from the world, Paul says, “this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling” (105), and it is the sympathy for the suffering of others to which he is referring. Paul realizes that so long as he is able to achieve “annihilation of all human feeling,” there is still some hope for his return to society broken but not entirely destroyed.
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