It’s queer, when one thinks about it,” goes on Kropp, “we are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who’s in the right?
Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.” “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden. “Not you, nor anybody else here.
I implore them with my eyes: Speak to me – take me up – take me, Life of my Youth – you who are care-free, beautiful – receive me again – I wait, I wait. Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me, they are mere shadows and memories. Nothing – nothing –.
Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army.
It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have faces that make one think – honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair. They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple picking. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland.
It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.
At last Ferdinand Kosole waltzes off with one, a husky wench with massive breastworks that should afford his gun a good lie. Now all the others are following his lead.
Our first experience of heavy artillery fire showed us our mistake, and the view of life that their teaching had given us fell to pieces under that bombardment.
The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves.
Even a soldier’s behind likes to sit soft.
The noises from outside all merge into one another, become a dream which disappears from the waking memory... he sees the woods and stars behind him, and so he moves on, an ordinary soldier, with his big boots and his webbing and his pack, making his tiny way under the sky’s great vault along the road that lies before him; a soldier who forgets things quickly and who isn’t even depressed much any more, but who just goes onwards under the great night sky.
There is the great sky again, and the stars, and the first streak of dawn, and he is walking beneath that sky, a soldier with big boots and a full belly, a little soldier in the early morning.
Die Worte wehten im Zwielicht hin und her, sie waren ohne Bedeutung, und das, was von Bedeutung war, war ohne Worte.
And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I.
We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery.
The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I will not have one friend left.
And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.
We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled – we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial – I believe we are lost.
The factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy; – dysentery dissolves our bowels.
The most beautiful city in the world is the one where you are happy.