Home Bitter Home

The theme I get from today's reading is the hopeless future from the soldiers. Muller brings up the topic of returning home, "peace-time", asking what his comrades would do. Many of them list at once the comforts they had back then, including getting drunk. However, for the younger men, they had no hope. When they were eighteen and were only starting to enjoy life, they were taken to war. The schooling they had were long forgotten, and they had no skills other than the war they were in, to help them survive a job in society. Kat had a family and he had somewhere to go. Paul, Kropp, Muller, and Tjaden had war turn them into men. Schooling back then did not teach them how to escape from death's very own hands in the war. They began to worry, and even began to appreciate their life in the army. In the army, everything was set for them. They had orders to follow, given meals to crave for, and their goal in life was to survive and make best of a horrible situation. Everything else seemed unreal and unimaginable. They even said that they believed in war. As well, the experience they had with bombardment, death... in the war completely wiped out any memory of home. They could not just step out of a memory like this easily. Home was not sweet after all, and that is only if they make it back.
One of the most exciting moments in this novel happened here. The soldiers experience a bombardment. Bombs, and gas were released upon the men. The men were attacked in a graveyard, and they forced themselves into shell holes and literally beside recent and old corpses. It was sad because people who died and who were buried were flung out of their coffins, yet to experience another painful death. Men who died during the bombardment were merely covered with soil. A man had a coffin fall onto his arm, breaking it. Another had a huge injury to his hip joint, leaving unable to walk again. What makes it most interesting, is that after the bombardment, they had to walk back to the lorries. Paul and Kat considered killing him then, so that the poor soldier wouldn't have to die an inevitable painful death when they return home. While they were riding home, it was as if nothing happened. Each man falling half asleep, and routinely ducking their head to avoid slicing off their head with hanging wire.
The protagonist would still be the young and old men fighting in the war. Antagonist would be war leaders/government that created a war, and life itself that the men would have to face once they get out of the war. Novel once again banned due to harsh reality of warfare and inappropriate speech the soldiers use to communicate with each other.