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“The Martyred World”: Nature’s Role in All Quiet on the Western Front
Rachel Maddox

From the beginning of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque shows how the
narrator, Paul, devolves from a chatty, persistent soldier to a friendless victim, eventually so
lonely that the day of his death is marked as “all quiet” (295). The war brings out the best and the
worst of the German soldiers, forcing them to become almost unfathomably brave and
unbelievably cold, from compassionate men saving dogs and horses from their misery to
becoming numb to death itself. The soldiers, however, are not the only victims of war. Remarque
shows that civilians, both French and German, suffer from the deprivations that the war imposes
upon them, and even conscripted service animals die the most horrible deaths. More subtle,
though, is Remarque’s depiction of nature throughout the novel, as it changes from a force of
good to a broken victim of war; plants and the earth itself respond to the trauma of bombardment
in ways that are similar to the soldiers’ responses to the same situations. Ultimately, nature is
shown as a victim of war just as much as the soldiers fighting that war, as battle takes the natural
world from its most lovely and peaceful to its most violent and unforgiving, eventually breaking
it on the rack of 20th-century warfare.

At first, the novel portrays nature as fulfilling a stereotypical role, offering Paul and his
friends peace and rest from the war around them. In an early description of their life at the front,
Paul states that “From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us. . . . To no man does
the earth mean so much as to the soldier,” suggesting that the only reliable force of good in the
soldiers’ lives is the natural world (55). Not only is nature a soldier’s safe haven, but the narrator
goes even further, stating that the earth is a soldier’s “only friend, his brother, his mother; he
stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him. . .

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