#8230; that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat...” His teacher did not teach this sudden sympathy that Paul displays. Paul told Katczinsky what had happened and Katczinsky related to the matter by saying that everyone goes through it their first time. Robert had gone through a different misconception of war. 3Robert’s sister Rowena was crippled so Robert always hung around with her to cheer her up; they were best friends. One day when Robert was out Rowena fell when she wasn’t being watched and died. This was the final draw and Robert decided that the last thing left for him to do was to leave his family and go to war. Robert enlisted into the army. Robert didn’t really know what he was doing, just that there was a war going on and he was going to be part of it. Unlike Paul, Robert wasn’t really taught anything about the war, he just figured it was away out of the real world. Throughout the entire book Paul shows a drastic change in his attitude towards his pre-enlistment society as oppose to his fellow comrades in the army. At first Paul seems to take the advice of his teacher and parents by enlisting into the army. He described his teacher’s persuasion to get his students to enlist into the army by saying, 4“surrendering our individual personalities more completely then we would ever have believed possible even in the most obsequious errand boy. Saluting, eyes front … we had imagined that our task would be rather different from all this, but we discovered that we were being trained to be heroes, the way they train circus horses, and we quickly got used to it.” This proves that Paul got use to the army quite easily. At another point of the book, Paul notices that he cannot communicate with the people he grew up ...
