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physically damaged as the soldiers. According to Bladimir Pitschmann’s “Overall View of
Chemical and Biochemical Weapons,” even “negligible concentrations” of the chemical
weapons used were certainly enough to destroy an environment, as they “easily penetrated
through protecting charcoal filters and forced soldiers to remove protective masks” (1770). Thus,
the stain of chemical warfare breaks down the natural world until the sun itself is “greasy”
instead of clear and “convulsed” just like the soldiers’ corpses.

This negativity and violence in nature is depicted as a direct reaction to or consequence
of the war, meaning that violence has broken nature itself—forcing it to act violently or
deceptively—just like the war breaks the soldiers in the trenches. Like the disheartening mist,
which in any other place would just be fog or falling dew, the ground itself is transformed into a
“little piece of convulsed earth” on which other parts of the natural world are sacrificed (135).
Just like the soldiers who are simultaneously crushed by the violence around them and imbued
with new life to ensure their survival, nature is sacrificed to the war. As Modris Eksteins argues
in “All Quiet on the Western Front and the Fate of War,” the earth, like the men, begins
“bursting with energy,” and each facet of it is “one by one . . . ripped apart at the front” at the
hands of the “insatiable Moloch” of war (350). With “no escape from the routinized slaughter”
(350), earth and man alike are beaten and broken by the horror and sheer energy of the violence
surrounding them. Left alone, as in the beginning of the novel and in civilian life, nature is
depicted in as positive terms as is typical for the natural world; it is only during Paul’s
description of the trenches that nature convulses and betrays the soldiers just as they themselves
are destroyed.

As nature becomes more like the soldiers crushed by war, the men return in kind and
become like elements of nature, showing war blurring the line between humans, animals, and the

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