My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.
The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it.
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave – there are no other possibilities.
Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.
I want to think and at the same time that’s the last thing in the world I want to do.
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.
Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.
They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal – no one will see it. But when a button is missing – everyone sees that.
A hospital alone shows what war is.
That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.
On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther – the machine-gun is covering the square.
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.