I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that is exactly what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guiltless; – if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what are their burdens, then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.
The trucks roll monotonously onwards, the shouts are monotonous, the falling rain is monotonous. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead men up at the front of the truck, on the body of the little recruit with a wound that is far too big for his hip, it’s falling on Kemmerich’s grave, and it’s falling in our hearts.
A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.
How beautiful it is when one lives completely and not with just a part of oneself. When one is full to the rim and calm because there is nothing more to get in.
The sergeant major.
Help when you can; do everything then – but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You’ll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn’t mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives.
The screaming of the beasts becomes louder. One can no longer distinguish whence in this now quiet silvery landscape it comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven and earth it rolls on immeasurably.
We live in rooms too much, I say. We think too much in rooms. We make love too much in rooms. We despair too much in rooms. Can you despair in the open?
Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren’t even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn’t stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.
A miracle is never perfect when it happens, there are always little disappointments. But once it’s gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect and then it would never change. If I can just call it to life now, won’t it always stay the same? Won’t it stay with me as long as I live?
You can’t know anything beforehand. The incurable can survive the healthy. Life is a strange phenomenon.
We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.
Here where you stand, a young Etruscan woman stood in just the same way three thousand years ago – and the wind came in just this way from Africa and chased the light across the ocean.
Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes. He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.
We thought to build us houses, we desired gardens with terraces, for we wanted to look out upon the sea and to feel the wind, but we did not think that a house needs foundations. We are like those abandoned fields full of shell holes in France, no less peaceful than the other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives, and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to plougher and ploughed.
Ravic knew the danger; he knew whither he was going and he also knew that tomorrow he would resist again – but suddenly in this night, in this hour of his return from a lost Ararat into the blood-smell of coming destruction, everything became nameless. Danger was danger and not danger; fate was at the same time a sacrifice and the deity to whom one sacrificed. And tomorrow was an unknown world.
My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.
We don’t act like that because we are in good humor; we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.
We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.
I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again.