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.
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.
I am conscious of the nameless sadness of Time that runs and runs on and changes, and when a man returns he shall find nothing again. – Yes, it is a hard thing to part; but to come back again, that is sometimes far harder.
All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder.
My hands grow cold and my flesh creeps; and yet the night is warm. Only the mist is cold, this mysterious mist that trails over the dead and sucks from them their last, creeping life. By morning they will be pale and green and their blood congealed and black.
Nobody can deceive a dying farmer!
And we stand still again, and suddenly we feel that everything out there in front of us, that absolute hell, that ragged patch of shell-holes, is still there inside us.
Where do flies go in winter?
The misery of millions is too big a price to pay for the heroics of a few.
But Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is blowing bubbles. ‘But look,’ he announces, ‘I simply can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I have.
Suddenly I realized that this was the beginning of a new life. But was it possible to start over again from scratch? To make myself at home in this new, unknown language? And, most frightening of all after all these years of fighting for survival, to learn once more how to live? And if I succeeded in coming back to life, would I not be betraying all my dead friends and loved ones?
Two years of rifle fire and hand grenades – you can’t just take it all off like a pair of socks afterwards -.
Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers – is that the reason why wars perpetually recur?
I am aware that I, without realizing it, have lost my feelings – I don’t belong here anymore, I live in an alien world. I prefer to be left alone, not disturbed by anybody. They talk too much – I can’t relate to them – they are only busy with the superficial things.
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. Katczinsky said that was a result of their upbringing. It made them stupid. And what Kat said, he had thought about.