He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
The cries continued, it is not men, they could not cry so terribly. ‘Wounded horses’, says Kat. It is is unendurable, it is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror and groaning.
He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds like ashes.
What ever came of the good scholars in the world? – In the hothouse of the school they do enjoy a short semblance of life, but only the more surely to sink back afterward into mediocrity and insignificance. The world has been bettered only by the bad scholars.
We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know.
They used to tie us to a tree, but that is forbidden now. In many ways we are treated quite like men. An.
But how can a man look after anyone in the field!
Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly.
All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings – greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance.
Paris is a city where time is best to spend by doing nothing.
For a moment I held her hand in mine and felt her warm, dry pressure. Then I went out to get the rum. The night stood big and silent about the little house. The leather seats of our car were moist. I stood and looked toward the horizon where the red glow of the city rose against the sky. I would gladly have stayed out there; but already I could hear Lenz calling.
The sergeant comes nearer. “It’s revolution,” he says quietly, “and who isn’t for us is against us.” Willy laughs. “Bloody fine revolution, no mistake! With your Society for the Removal of Shoulder Straps! If that’s all you want – ” He spits contemptuously. “Not so fast, Mate,” says the one-armed man, now walking swiftly toward him. “We do want a lot more! We want an end of war, an end of all this hatred! An end of murder! That’s what we’re after. We want to be men again, not war machines!
Peace, a fireplace, books, silence... Before this was seen as one philistinism. Now these are dreams of a lost paradise.
The stars are cold.
It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the incoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divination of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.
Not everyone’s life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors – and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets.
You do, Bob. You have the requirements for it. A certain simplicity is necessary for love. You have it. Keep it. It is a gift of God. Never to be gotten again once it is lost.” “Don’t take it to heart too much, though, Baby,” said Lenz with a grin. “It’s no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.
How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it.
I felt it, it excited me, and then it struck like a wave against the barrier reef – I knew she did not mean me at all; she meant someone else, some figure of her fantasy, Rolf or Rudolf; and perhaps she did not mean them either, perhaps they were just names thrown up from dark, subterranean streams, without roots or connections.
As usual in times of war, fear, and affliction, the individual human being had ceased to exist; only one thing counted: a valid passport.
It keeps bobbing back disconcertingly, and then you are confronted by irreconcilable contrast: the skies of childhood and the science of killing, lost youth and the cynicism of knowledge gained too young.