For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress – to the future.
Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days; – when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.
All Quiet on the Western Front.
Katczinsky says it is all to do with education – it softens the brain.
Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial – I believe we are lost.
Our knowledge of life is limited to death.
Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.
You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don’t believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.
The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.