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warfare impacts on ecosystem functioning are indeed overwhelmingly deleterious,” eventually
rendering nature less powerful and positive than the soldiers would like to believe (153).
Nature’s failure to protect the soldiers begins to hint at the fact that it is not as powerful as the
soldiers originally believe, and that it is, at least to some extent, incapable of protecting them in
the ways that they need.

It eventually becomes clear that nature cannot protect the soldiers because the world itself
is being beaten and crushed, with Remarque showing the natural world beginning to play a
passive, rather than simply failing, role in the soldiers’ lives. While the parts of nature that are
physically accessible, like the earth and sun, prove ineffective against the soldiers’ struggles, the
rest of nature is too passive and beyond their reach to be of any use to them. The wood beyond
the trenches—which would promise Paul safety from the falling shells—is “too distant and
dangerous” and later “vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn to pieces” (66). In this way, the
forest is even more helpless than the earth when the soldiers try to find solace in it; rather than
simply failing to meet their needs, the wood is not even as accessible as something to be futilely
dug under or sought out. At this point, the soldiers do not particularly blame the natural world for
failing them. Instead, they realize that war forces the woods into a position in which they can
offer no protection and are eventually destroyed, and the issue of failure without personal blame
continues throughout nature’s role in the novel.

Even the parts of nature that survive bombardment are twisted from their original purpose
or existence to tempt and mislead the soldiers, ending in their deaths and showing an actively
negative side of the natural world as it functions in the novel. One of the most obvious and
insidious examples of this issue is Paul’s story of an unnamed soldier and a cherry tree. The
narrator says that the soldier should not be held accountable for his poorly planned desertion

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