Paul's company returns from the front with only 80 of 150 men surviving and receives unexpectedly large food rations.

Paul visits his mortally wounded boyhood friend Kemmerich in the hospital while Muller pressures him to hand over his boots.

Paul and his comrades ambush Corporal Himmelstoss in the dark, throw a bedsheet over him, and beat him savagely.

Paul's company moves toward the front lines and is suddenly caught in a devastating enemy bombardment.

A gas attack forces the men to scramble for their masks while sheltering in a graveyard under heavy shelling.

Paul's company marches back to the front and passes a schoolhouse with coffins stacked against its wall.

The enemy launches a full ground assault on the German trenches and Paul's company fights back with machine guns and grenades.

After weeks of brutal combat at the front, Paul's company is reduced from 150 men to only 32 survivors.

Paul is granted leave from the front but feels completely alienated from his family and his childhood home.

Trapped in No Man's Land, Paul stabs a French soldier who unexpectedly falls into his shell hole.

During an assignment guarding an evacuated town, Paul and Kropp are both struck by enemy shellfire and badly wounded.

Albert Kropp's leg is amputated at the Red Cross hospital, leaving him despondent and without hope.

Muller is killed in action at the front, and Paul inherits the boots that once belonged to Kemmerich.

Kat is wounded during a shelling and Paul carries him to safety, only to discover that Kat died along the way.

An unnamed narrator reports that Paul was killed in battle on an otherwise quiet day at the front.

Paul Baumer and his company of German soldiers navigate the brutal realities of World War I trench warfare, beginning with a grim reminder that only 80 of 150 men have survived their latest deployment. The story moves through catastrophic front-line engagements — a sudden bombardment, a gas attack in a graveyard, and a prolonged enemy assault — that leave the company shattered and barely thirty men standing. After a disorienting leave that reveals how completely the war has broken his connection to civilian life, Paul returns to face mounting losses. The deaths of close comrades Muller and, most devastatingly, Kat strip Paul of his last emotional anchors. The novel closes with a sudden narrative shift as an unnamed voice reports that Paul himself was killed in battle, confirming the doom his own words had long foretold.

The headline events of Paul's war experience from the trenches to his death.

Schoolteacher Kantorek uses his classroom authority to pressure his young students into enlisting for the war effort.

Paul recalls that before the war he was an aspiring writer with poems and a play stored at home.

Paul and Kropp dump a full latrine bucket on Corporal Himmelstoss as an act of defiance during training.

A group of inexperienced new recruits arrives at camp, contrasting sharply with Paul's battle-hardened company.

Wounded horses scream in agony at the front and Detering bitterly protests their use in modern warfare before they are shot dead.

Muller asks the men what they intend to do after the war and the men respond with vague, unimaginative answers.

Tjaden openly insults Himmelstoss, earns a court-martial for his insubordination, and receives only a light sentence of brief confinement.

Kat and Paul secretly cook a stolen goose in the woods at night and share the meal with their comrades.

During a reprieve from fighting, Paul and some comrades encounter French girls and Paul feels a tender, melancholy affection for one.

While walking in his hometown on leave, Paul hears a streetcar and instinctively ducks for cover in a panic.

Paul visits Kemmerich's grieving mother and insists her son felt no pain when he died, though this is a lie.

Paul observes the Russian prisoners living in filth and starvation, feels deep sympathy for them, and then forces himself to stop.

Paul's father and sister travel to visit him at the training camp on the moors during his absence from the front.

Paul gives his mother's homemade jam to the starving Russian prisoners, then feels guilt for taking it from his sick mother.

Detering loses his grip on sanity, abandons his post at the front without warning, and is never heard from again.

These events illuminate the world surrounding Paul's main story — the manipulation that brought young men to war, the small rebellions and fleeting joys that kept them human, and the toll the war exacted far beyond the battlefield. From Kantorek's classroom propaganda and the humiliation of training under Himmelstoss, to stolen geese and court-martials over petty insults, this pool captures the texture of daily life amid catastrophe. Paul's shattering leave — marked by shell shock, emotional numbness, and a lie told to a grieving mother — reveals how thoroughly the front has remade him. The Russian prisoners, the French girls, and Detering's eventual breakdown all show how war destroys everyone it touches, whether they stand at the front or on its edges.

The moments behind the trenches that reveal the human cost of war on all sides.

Paul realizes that men like Kantorek enthusiastically send others to fight a war they will never have to experience themselves.

Kemmerich dies and is immediately removed from his hospital bed with no ceremony to make room for more wounded.

Kat tells Paul that the German army is losing the war, a grim assessment that increasingly proves correct.

During a fierce bombardment in a graveyard, Paul shelters under a coffin and lets the dead protect him from death.

A panicking young recruit tries to flee the trenches during bombardment and Kat and Paul physically beat him back to safety.

Alone on night watch duty after a counterattack, Paul realizes the war has permanently and irreversibly changed who he is.

Paul arrives home on leave and freezes at the sight of his sister before breaking down and weeping in the entryway.

Paul turns to his old book collection for comfort during leave but finds he can no longer connect to his former self.

Paul recognizes that the Russian prisoners are peasants from humble backgrounds, just like the German soldiers who are fighting them.

The men debate who truly benefits from the war and who started it during their preparations for a visit from the Kaiser.

Paul is paralyzed by primal fear during a night patrol and concludes that his leave of absence has made him dangerously vulnerable.

Paul pleads with the dying French soldier he has stabbed, begging forgiveness and promising to care for the man's family.

A wounded soldier at the Red Cross hospital tries to stab himself with a fork, revealing the war's trauma follows men everywhere.

Berger charges into heavy enemy fire to reach a wounded messenger dog and is shot in the pelvis.

Paul concludes that his entire generation has been hollowed out by the war and that even survivors will be lost souls.

This pool traces the turning points of conscience, fear, and self-understanding that give the novel its psychological depth. Paul moves from youthful disillusionment — recognizing that advocates for war never have to fight it — through a series of shattering emotional crises, including his breakdown upon arriving home and his inability to find comfort in his old books or his own family. The most pivotal moment comes in No Man's Land, where Paul kills a man up close for the first time and then watches him die slowly, overwhelmed by guilt and grief. Even the hospital offers no refuge, as a patient's attempted self-harm reveals that the trauma of war follows men everywhere. These revelations accumulate into a final reckoning: Paul concludes that his entire generation has been destroyed, and the novel's abrupt ending makes that destruction absolute.

The key revelations and emotional shifts that define Paul's inner journey through the war.