Wars can make men become wild savages who are nothing like who they had been before. Two ordinary men can go into a war and have nothing against each other yet be enemies shooting at each other in battle. This is only because some leader had told them to do this. If it hadn’t been for war and they had met under different circumstances, they could be very good friends and not hate each other at all. In the book All Quiet on the Western Front, an uncaring doctor, cruelty toward enemy captives, and a thoughtless stabbing incident show war’s ability to bring out the inhumanity in man.

In a war-time field hospital, doctors can be worked to the point where they no longer care about the wounded patients they serve. The doctors in essence become heartless and nothing affects them. They care less about patients dying than being comfortable themselves that day. When a man named Kemmerich is dying in a hospital after an amputation, his friend Paul, not knowing what to do, desperately says to a doctor, “come quick, Franz Kemmerich is dying,” and the doctor, being informed of the amputation wound annoyingly answers, “how should I know anything about it [him], I’ve amputated five legs to-day,” (31-32) as he hurries of to the operating room. This doctor obviously doesn’t care about Kemmerich dying and thinks that it might be good because there will be more room in the hospital for other wounded soldiers.

A second example of war making people inhumane toward other people is the way the Germans treat the Russian POWs or prisoners of war. The Russians are fed so little that they “slink about… camp and pick over garbage tins…They find… unwashed carrot tops- moldy potatoes,” (189). I understand that food is scarce but if they can’t feed the prisoners even enough to survive, then they shouldn’t keep them at all. I would almost think that the Russian POWs would rather be shot and killed then have to starve to death in a war camp.

A third example of soldiers’ inhumanity is when the character Paul stabs a man that he doesn’t even know. Paul is hiding in a crater and when an enemy soldier jumps in unaware of Paul, Paul stabs him leading to a long agonizing death. I do agree with Paul that if he hadn’t stabbed the man in the crater he wouldn’t be alive to continue telling his story. The only reason Paul would stab the man in the crater is because if he didn’t, the other man would stab him. The only reason any of them would stab each other is because they had been told they were enemies and that they should kill each other. Although Paul does stab this man, he does come around and end up grieving the man’s death even though I think that Paul would stab the man again in a heartbeat if it came down to one of them having to be killed in order for the other to survive.

A heartless doctor, starved Russian POWs, and a soldier stabbing another all show incidents of how war can make men inhumane towards each other. Men went into WW1 as perfectly normal citizens and came out scarred by all the inhumanity they had to experience throughout the war. War can change a man into something he never wanted to become.