We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man.
I said no more and made off. It is no use quarrelling with excited maternal instincts. They have the moral support of the entire world behind them.
The pillars of human society are covetousness, fear, and corruption,” retorted Grau. “Man is evil, but loves the good – when others do it.
What is leave? – A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse. Already the sense of parting begins to intrude itself. My mother watches me silently; I know she counts the days; every morning she is sad. It is one day less. She has put away my pack, she does not want to be reminded by it.
What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?
Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand.
Doesn’t this make you sad, Ferdinand?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Cynical, if you like. One is sad when one thinks about life – cynical when one sees what people make of it.
Shortly after the war Valentin had come into a little money, and had been drinking it ever since. He considered it his duty to celebrate his good luck in having come out alive. It was nothing to him that that was now several years ago. One could never celebrate it enough, he used to explain. He was one of those with an uncanny memory of the war. The rest of us had forgotten many things; but he remembered every day and every hour.
It keeps them going, staves off the evil day when they will be alone. And to be alone, really alone, without illusion, that way lies madness – and suicide.
That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The subject.
To hell with it. What was the use trying to make safe and sure our little life? Sooner or later the great wave must come and sweep it all away. “What about a drink with me, Fred?
But I also knew that there was no going back. One can never go back; nothing and no one is ever the same. All that remained was an occasional evening of sadness, the sadness that we all feel because everything passes and because man is the only animal who knows it.
It was a long time since I had been in a theatre. And I would not have come now had Pat not wanted it. Theatres, concerts, books – all these middle-class habits I had almost lost. It was not the time for them. Politics provided theatre enough – the shootings every night made another concert – and the gigantic book of poverty was more impressive than any library.
The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing.
He it is still and yet it is not he any longer.
That they have, indeed! My sisters tell how they had to scrounge to get the supper together. Twice the gendarmes took everything from them at the station. The third time they sewed the eggs inside their cloaks, put the sausages into their blouses and hid the potatoes in pockets inside their skirts. That time they got through.
Only whatever you do, don’t lose your freedom. It is more precious than love and you only find our afterwards.
Julge saab olla ainult siis, kui ka hirmu tuntakse.
Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is; they are the voices of my pals.
All at once I feel utterly dejected. “What was the good of it all, Mother?” I say. She strokes my hand. “It must have been for some good, Ernst. The Father in heaven knows, you may be sure of that.