swim a closely guarded canal, not for the brief pleasures of a soldiers' brothel but for the luxury of hours with three French girls. When Westhus dies after all, Paul is due for leave and temporary reassignment and wonders in agony who will be there when he returns. On leave in his hometown, Paul relishes the way his classmate Mittelstaedt torments their old schoolmaster Kantorek, now a pitiful specimen of a soldier in the reserve unit Mittelstaedt commands. Nowhere is Paul comfortable. Duty drags him to visit Kemmerich's mother, but his own sensitivity has been dulled by the carnage and he can't begin to comprehend her hysterical grief over a single soldier. His own books and papers no longer comfort him, his civilian clothes don't fit, old men lecture him on how they think the war is really going, and his mother, whom he adores, is seriously ill. So out of place does he feel that he is glad to report for duty at a nearby camp. There he often guards Russian prisoners of war, who he begins to identify as men like himself and his comrades. The more he sees their suffering, the less he can grasp why he must call them enemy. When Paul rejoins his company, he is relieved to find that all his closest friends have survived. Polishing is the order of the day; the troops are preparing for an inspection by the Kaiser. The whole ridiculous display leaves them burning with resentment at the blindness of their leaders. Up at the front again, Paul volunteers for a scouting mission with his friends. He is briefly separated from them in the dark trenches and panics until their distant voices steady him. Only comradeship sustains him now. Later, trapped by shelling, he blindly, repeatedly, stabs a French soldier who falls into his foxhole and must listen and watch for hours as the man's life slowly ebbs. He is guilt stricken at having personally killed a plain soldier like himself. It takes the cool way the sniper Oellrich tallies up his kills to sna...
