Chapter Four: How War Really Is

     The beginning of chapter four is all about to ride to The Front. They ride on a lorry, over bumpy roads, and after a long ride in the middle of the night, they arrive at the front, where bombs and shots were already beginning to go off. In this bombing, the narrator finds a new, young soldier, extremely scared and obviously new to the warfare. They help, comfort and protect him. The bombing only lasts a few hours, but there's a long wait before the lorries come back to retrieve the soldiers. While waiting, many of the horses have been hit and wounded, crying out with loud, ear-piercing sounds. Finally, some soldiers decide to just shoot the horses, although this means losing some of their transportation. The soldiers decide that since it's just about 3 in the morning, they should probably start heading back to the lorry. But as they're on their way, the worst of this days (or nights?) war happened. They were in the middle of an empty field when bombs started to come in. Their first instinct was to run, but to where? The woods were surely too far away, and the field wouldn't provide any protection. Their last resort was the nearby grave yard. They all got behind mounds of dirt, and lay as flat and as covered as possible. The bombs came in, sending pieces of coffins and dead bodies flying everywhere. As giant holes were made in the dirt, other soldiers, along with the narrator, crawled inside, hoping the bombs wouldn't hit the same spot twice, and that the dirt, coffins, and even the dead people would provide some protection.
           At one point, Remarque says, "But the shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities, I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, thought Death himself lies in it." This is a big statement to me. He is truly telling how brutal and manipulating war is. This war has caused them to literally use their fallen soldiers as shields. And the irony of the fact that he says that the coffin shall protect him, helping him stay alive, even though Death is literally inside of it, but that he doesn't care, shows how crazy the war makes people. I can't even imagine hiding from bombs, trying to stay alive, while the war is so scary that you are hiding under someone who is dead. This chapter really helps to put you in the soldiers shoes and really see how powerful war is.
This is a picture I found of French soldiers, behind barbed wire, like the beginning of chapter 4 describes. The soldiers are low to the ground, rather dirty and equipped with huge guns. This helps to create a visual of what the war would have been, looked and felt like.