Stranger's Eyes

The main event that happened in the chapter that I read was the attack of soldiers after the bombardment. The soldiers slept and waited in trenches for the bombardment to be over. It went on for days, forcing the soldiers to stay put anxiously with corpse rats. Corpse rats are fat rats that live off corpses that war left behind. These rats are greedy and fierce. They even bit cats and dogs to death, just to satisfy their disgusting appetite. When the soldiers received their ration of bread, no matter how hard they tried to keep them safe rats would nibble and gnaw at it. Kropp, the thinker amongst them, wrapped it in waterproof bag and slept on it. These aggressive rate crawled over his face to get their greedy face into it. The soldiers soon got extremely tired of them, so they came up with a plan. The solders chopped off all the bits and pieces the rats nibbled at, and threw them into a pile, waiting for these rats to come. Once they did, they lit the whole pile on fire, burning the bread and rats into ashes. There were so many rats, they had to do it a number of times before the other rats realize what was happening, and temporarily stopped bothering them. These corpse rats sicken me the most.
The situation the soldiers had to live with during those few days were not the most comforting. As mentioned before, the men had to live with large corpse rats. As well, listening to bombs and shelling without end for days is complete mental torture. Many men began to go insane, they felt trapped in the trench, and were mentally tortured. They would try to get out of the trench, even though they would be killed the instant they were out. Paul and Kat had to stop one of the men from going out because a man before had run out and ran all over the place until he was shot dead. They had to tie him to a chair to prevent the man from running out, yet they had to be ready to release him right when the attack of soldiers came. They tried playing games to pass time, but everybody was too anxious. They couldn't sleep, and couldn't even look at each other, scared to be off guard any second. It's no wonder so many people had shell shock during this history of World War One.
An emotional aspect to this, and the theme that I chose, occurred after the bombardment when French soldiers began to attach the Germans. Paul described how each soldier survived by chance, and the novel painted a lively picture of the fighting. Hand grenades were thrown, rifles and machine guns were used, and men even died because they tripped over the wire that was used as defense, slicing their arms off. When Paul aimed his hand grenade at a soldier, until he actually saw his face and looked into the enemies' eyes. For a moment, everything else seemed unreal , and his hand would not release the grenade. This revealed how each soldier was there fighting, not because of hate of one another, but because of orders and self defence. Without these uniforms of ethnicity, blind artillery, two soldiers might even be able to sit down and become friends. None of the soldiers there were fighting one another, they were just trying to keep themselves alive. One of the things that really hit me, was when Paul said that even if his own father was there across with the enemy, he would fight. No soldier had the enemies' face in mind, they just had the fear of death and unpleasant excitement of war.
This might be the reason why this novel was banned, not due to any inappropriate content, but because of the maturity level needed to read this novel. I think if I came across this in middle school, I would've become very interested and would want to know more about World War One. This novel was banned due the harsh reality of humanity and was banned as just of a warning: THIS IS NOT YOUR HAPPY FANTASY BOOK. However, if given the choice, I wouldn't ban this novel, because it would inspire interest and respect among youth.