At the beginning of the fifth chapter the group is back at base camp and are killing their lice. All is fairly uneventful, and Müller asks the rest of the group what they would do if it was peace-time. The group gives various different answers: Haie would, if he was a non-com, stay in the army for peace-time until he got his pension, but Kropp would leave the army immediately. Detering wants to go back to his farm and family - they haven't been doing so well.
Himmelstoss comes up to the group and is startled by the group's collective reactions. Tjaden insults him and calls him a dirty hound, and Himmelstoss angrily goes off to fetch the sergeant-major. Haie and Tjaden go off to somewhere where Tjaden won't be found immediately.
When Himmelstoss and Tjaden have gone off, the group suddenly starts asking itself the average school question. Kropp is the ultimate winner with the question "What is the meaning of cohesion?"
The group talks about what will happen after the war, and what they'll do in what we civilians like to call society. Paul comments on how pointless salaries and professions and other norms of our society are, and makes another allusion to death: "We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces." (Pages 87-88, All Quiet on the Western Front)
This is perhaps so far the most revealing chapter in regards to the characters' minds about the war and what will come after. They clearly all have disdain for the educational system and its questions which don't have any actual signifigance in any real-world application and the younger soldiers in the group who don't have wives or children back home are clearly deeply scarred from the war, even if they try not to show it, including Paul.
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