Quote 40
On the platform I look round; I know no one among the people hurrying to and fro. A Red Cross sister offers me something to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so obsessed with her own importance: "Just look, I am giving a solder coffee!" – She calls me "Comrade," but I will have none of it. (7.95)
Paul comes across many people who seem more concerned with the image of the war than the actuality of the war. A nun even, in this instance, is caught up in the performance of help. In what ways is the war Paul describes like a performance? In what ways is it not at all?
Quote 41
It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have faces that make one think – honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair.
They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple-picking. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland. (8.11-12)
The more the soldiers find connections and a sense of humanity in their enemies, the harder it is for them to endure the war. Again, nature and farming imagery comes up in this moment. The French soldiers don't look like killers – they look like cultivators of the earth, people who bring about life, not death.
Quote 42
We had sworn for weeks past to do this. Kropp had even gone so far as to propose entering the postal service in peace-time in order to be Himmelstoss's superior when he became a postman again. He reveled in the thought of how he would grind him. It was this that made it impossible for him to crush us altogether – we always reckoned that later, at the end of the war, we would have our revenge on him. (3.62)
Himmelstoss seems like more of an enemy than anyone else in this novel.