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from the German army and that the military leaders should be able to tell that the soldier’s only
fault is that “he saw a cherry tree in a garden” (275) and that its beauty causes “homesickness
and momentary aberration” so that he feels the inescapable need to return home (277). Unlike in
the helpless woods just outside the soldiers’ reach, in which nature stands by while terrible things
happen, in this example the soldier suffers (and is likely court-martialed) because of nature’s
interference in his life. This section marks a transition in nature’s behavior in the novel, but Paul
still refuses to directly hold any part of the natural world accountable for its deceit. As a result,
he appears to view nature’s devolution as being a result of war itself and not any individual
situation’s responsibility.

Eventually, nature begins to play an aggressive role against the soldiers, presenting itself
as one of the most harmful and psychologically damaging parts of trench warfare. Remarque
writes that one of the most frightening and traumatic aspects of the war is not the shelling or
trenches themselves but the mist that spreads after each battle. Different from the deadly gasses
used by both sides, this mist is as natural as it is “cold, this mysterious mist that trails over the
dead and sucks from them their last, creeping life” (123), and it coats the soldiers with a spiritual
dread that compounds their physical misery. After the bullets and bombs and shrapnel directly
kill the men, the mist deprives the living and the dead of their metaphorical souls—a well-
recognized symbol of the separation between humanity and the animal world. The earth does not
spread disturbing mist of its own free will, of course. It has been distorted beyond its original
functions until “the brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun’s rays;
the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons. . . . Into our pierced and
shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the
convulsed and dead soldiers” (115). Bombings and chemical warfare have left the earth as

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