[Music] in chapter 8 of All Quiet on the Western Front Paulus sent back to the camp or corporal him estas trained his platoon his young recruits everything has changed and the campus full of new people but he falls quickly back into the same mechanical routine of military camp life each day the soldiers practice company drill which allows Paul to be outdoors where he finds comfort and the natural beauty of the sand and trees next to Paul's training camp is a Russian prison camp separated from his camp by a barbed wire fence however the prisoners often amble over to the German side of the camp looking through the garbage bins Paul finds it's strange to see the prisoners their sworn enemies up close like this and he marvels at the fact that these men are his enemies only because a word of command has made them so and that same word of command might transform them back into comrades they look like peasants who have found themselves inexplicably in the wrong place it disturbs Paul to see them beg for food in the evenings the prisoners try to trade their boots for food and Paul notes how humanely the Russian prisoners treat each other he's curious about who they are as people and what their lives were like before the war Paul essentially sees power-hungry officers and teachers has greater enemies than these Russian prisoners are to him and tries not to lose himself in these thoughts he shares his cigarettes with the prisoners and after a funeral for one of the Russian prisoners who died fairly often in the camp Paul listens as the Russians sing and one of them plays a violin Paul's father and sister come to visit him one Sunday because Paul is used up all his leave time they discussed his mother's illness which has been diagnosed as cancer she's been hospitalized and is awaiting an operation that his father knows they can't afford in chapter 8 Paul ruminates on the difficulty seeing the Russian prisoners as enemies because he realizes that it's a fiction based on a single command by someone he's never met in fact he says the Russian prisoners look as kindly as our own peasants in Germany here a common theme arises again the notion that the people who create wars are the true enemies of the soldier Paul's empathy for the Russian prisoners reveals how the insistence on nationalistic pride during World War one was flimsy fiction many types of war propaganda portrayed the opposing forces as the enemy highlighting their differences but Paul has a difficult time dehumanizing the men he sees starving and begging it pains him to see how reduced by suffering these Russians have become and they're playing music together shows that their humanity transcends the enmity of these nations at war Paul intimates that he finds the war utterly meaningless