When faced with a violent world where hyper-masculine ideals ruled and gave way to a lack of respect for life, Baumer finds solace in observations of the nature surrounding him that is so rapidly being brutalized by the war. In some ways, nature is a representation of Baumer himself- he is full of rage, yet gentle, and rapidly being marred by violence. As in the first chapter when his friends and schoolmates were still together in the poppy field and “wind plays with our hair; it plays with our words and thoughts” (Remarque 4), other winds of change were shifting, ones of war that would destroy what could have been, and lives that should have been. During wartime, Germany reverts to forceful, hyper-masculine, and passionate nationalism,
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“The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live” (17).
Nature is Paul’s connection to life, to his childhood, to what was before death. He remembers sitting by a stream as a child while he sits on sentry duty, he relates the butterflies on the battlefield to those he collected as a boy. It is not only Paul who holds onto his past life through nature. Detering, a farmer cries out for dying horses on the battlefield, cries out for them to be shot, to be put out of their miserably short lives: “We are pale. Detering stands up. "God! For God 's sake! Shoot them!” (Remarque 30).
Remarque not only mourns the death of young men in All Quiet on the Western Front but also the death of nature. Nature is a representation of life to Paul, and he holds onto it so tightly. A certain creative liberty taken in the film was the final scene: Paul reaching out over a trench wall to try to touch a fluttering butterfly, dead-eyed and hopeless. This was the act that killed him: Although the soldiers were forced to fight in an animalistic and vicious sense to survive, nature was many of their way of keeping sane. Without the butterflies, birds, and wind, would Paul have cracked earlier? Would he have given way to thoughts that his schoolmates did, that the battlefield would both be his manhood, and his
“The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live” (17).
Nature is Paul’s connection to life, to his childhood, to what was before death. He remembers sitting by a stream as a child while he sits on sentry duty, he relates the butterflies on the battlefield to those he collected as a boy. It is not only Paul who holds onto his past life through nature. Detering, a farmer cries out for dying horses on the battlefield, cries out for them to be shot, to be put out of their miserably short lives: “We are pale. Detering stands up. "God! For God 's sake! Shoot them!” (Remarque 30).
Remarque not only mourns the death of young men in All Quiet on the Western Front but also the death of nature. Nature is a representation of life to Paul, and he holds onto it so tightly. A certain creative liberty taken in the film was the final scene: Paul reaching out over a trench wall to try to touch a fluttering butterfly, dead-eyed and hopeless. This was the act that killed him: Although the soldiers were forced to fight in an animalistic and vicious sense to survive, nature was many of their way of keeping sane. Without the butterflies, birds, and wind, would Paul have cracked earlier? Would he have given way to thoughts that his schoolmates did, that the battlefield would both be his manhood, and his