It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp.
It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” – Paul Baumer.
Our knowledge of life is limited to death.” – Paul Baumer.
When you wake up it is spring and when you go to sleep it is fall and a thousand times in between it is winter and summer, and when we love each other enough we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind, and that is much.
While I was despairing and thinking everything was lost, it was quietly growing. I thought that parting was always final. Now I know that growing is a kind of parting. To grow means to leave something behind. And there is no end to it.
We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.
The Front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty.
Once we had such desires – but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us.
Summer of 1918 – Never has life in its niggardliness seemed to us so desirable as now; – the red poppies in the meadows round our billets, the smooth beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, dim rooms, the black mysterious trees of the twilight, the stars and the flowing waters, dreams, and long sleep – O Life, life, life!
Happiness lies all around us. We only have to pick it up.
So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this forever, it will always come back and stand before me.
Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual.
The blonde girl twitters: “Bread – good – –.
The dark turns into madness. It rocks and rages. Dark things, darker than the night itself, rush upon us in great waves, over us and onwards.
Dem Soldaten ist sein Magen und seine Verdauung ein vertrauteres Gebiet als jedem anderen Menschen.
Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.
I think it is more of a kind of fever,” says Albert. “No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing – and yet half the world is in it all the same.
But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.
We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough – and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked.
We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death.