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.
My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run. Soldiers pass by me, I hear their voices without understanding. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.
In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.
Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up – take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.
Things become quieter, but the cries do not cease. “What’s up, Albert?” I ask. “A couple of columns over there got it in the neck.” The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. “Wounded horses,” says Kat. It’s unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.
Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child – why can I not put my head in your lap and weep? Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled? I would like to weep and be comforted too, indeed I am little more than a child; in the wardrobe still hang short, boy’s trouser – it is such a little time ago, why is it over?
Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.
Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear.
I felt the sombre grief, that had sunk down in me like a stone, begin to be lapped about by a wild hope, change and in some strange way mingle with hope; the one became the other; the grief, the hope, the wind, the evening, and the beautiful girl between the shining mirror and the lights; yes, for a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real and profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even – love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.
Before my mother’s tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone.
We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing – and yet half the world is in it all the same.” “But there are more lies told by the other side than by us,” say I; “just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it says that we eat Belgian children. The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves. They are real culprits.
Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.
There is one thing I’d like to know, though,’ says Albert, ‘and that’s whether there would still have been a war if the Kaiser had said no.’ ‘I’m sure there would,’ I put in. ‘After all, they say that he didn’t want to fight at all at the beginning.’ ‘Well, if not just him, then perhaps if, let’s say twenty or thirty people in the world had said no?’ ‘Maybe not then,’ I admit. ‘But they all did want a war.
Nobody taught us at school how to light a cigarette in a rainstorm, or how it is still possible to make a fire even with soaking wet wood – or that the best place to stick a bayonet is into the belly, because it can’t get jammed in there, the way it can in the ribs.
Tjaden comes back. He is still worked up and joins in the debate again straight away by asking how a war starts in the first place. ‘Usually when one country insults another one badly,’ answers Kropp, a little patronizingly. But Tjaden isn’t going to be put off. ‘A country? I don’t get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a forest, or a cornfield.
I think it’s more a kind of fever,’ says Albert. ‘Nobody really wants it, but all of a sudden, there it is. We didn’t want the war, they say the same thing on the other side – and in spite of that, half the world is at it hammer and tongs.
A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?
You see,” said Otto. “That’s the gift of age. Tears and laughter – quick changes. No resentments. Something one might well learn,” he observed meditatively.