Paul's delicacy and understanding extends to advice about tossing away underpants soiled by the young soldier during his first bombardment. Not capable of Müller's pragmatism, Paul nonetheless adapts to war and passes along the training he gains from Kat and from personal experience to the raw recruit who does not respond quickly enough to poisonous gas. His thought processes are continually pulled to and fro, from the romantic notions of war he learned in school to the horrific lessons he absorbs through war's random destruction of his friends. Too innocent and inexperienced at first to foresee the violent shift in his thinking, Paul, whose last name comes from the German word for tree, must learn to bend and sway with violent forces in order to remain firmly rooted in reality and to survive the inhuman buffeting that besets the German army.
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