I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.
There is no guilt in feelings ever.
Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again – words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!
An hour passes. I sit tensely and watch his every movement in case he may perhaps say something. What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.
By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.
Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.
That is a generation’s difference these days,” Ferdinand continued. “A lifetime’s difference. A thousand years’ difference. What do you children understand of existence? You’re afraid even of your own feelings. You don’t write letters – you telephone; you don’t dream – you go for week-end excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics – a pitiable race.
Don’t ask about the consequences if you want to do something. Otherwise you’ll never do it.
Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts – it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung – a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice.
The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavor to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily.
We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.
Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer’s hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.
Those are for us,’ growls Detering. ‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Kat snaps back at him. ‘You’ll be lucky to get a coffin at all,’ grins Tjaden, ’they’ll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.
Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts.
Why – the question on which all logic, all philosophy, all science has shattered up to now.
Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?
Trommelfeuer, Sperrfeuer, Gardinenfeuer, Minen, Gas, Tanks, Maschinengewehre, Handgranaten – Worte, Worte aber sie umfassen das Grauen der Welt.
Please let the wind of desire that rose from the multi-coloured spines of those books catch me up again, let it melt the heavy, lifeless lead weight that is there somewhere inside me, and awaken in me once again the impatience of the future, the soaring delight in the world of the intellect – let it carry me back into the ready-for-anything lost world of my youth.
Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years; – and yet too much for twenty years.