All Quiet on the Western Front: Chapters 8–9

Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun.

Only the dregs that the ladle cannot reach are tipped out and thrown into the garbage tins.

But now they are quite apathetic and listless...

“If only I knew how much the operation costs,” says he.
“Have you not asked?”
“Not directly. I cannot do that — the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on Mother.”

Everyone is peevish and touchy, we do not take kindly to all this polishing, much less to the full-dress parades.

Such things exasperate a soldier more than the front-line.

“But what I would like to know,” says Albert, “is whether there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No.”
“I’m sure there would,” I interject, “he was against it from the first.”

Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. “A country? I don’t follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.”

The ground lies stark in the pale light, and then the darkness shuts down again blacker than ever.

In whirling confusion my thoughts hum in my brain — I hear the warning voice of my mother, I see the Russians with the flowing beards leaning against the wire fence, I have a bright picture of a canteen with stools, of a cinema in Valenciennes; tormented, terrified, in my imagination I see the grey, implacable muzzle of a rifle which moves noiselessly before me whichever way I try to turn my head.

I do not think at all, I make no decision — I strike madly home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then becomes limp, and collapses.

But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.

This dead man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise everything, in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to placate him —

...deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it is a little stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will see to it.