All Quiet on the Western Front: Chapters 10–12

So we zealously set to work to create an idyll — an idyll of eating and sleeping of course.

So we zealously set to work to create an idyll — an idyll of eating and sleeping of course.

Tjaden has become so fastidious that he only half smokes his cigars.

On the way we meet the fleeing inhabitants trundling their goods and chattels along with them in wheelbarrows, in perambulators, and on their backs.

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.

What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account?

Two men stand at the door to forestall the sisters and keep them occupied if they chance to come along.

It is a great brotherhood, which adds something of the good-fellowship of the folk-song, of the feeling of solidarity of convicts, and of the desperate loyalty to one another of men condemned to death, to a condition of life arising out of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death — seeking in a wholly unpathetic way a fleeting enjoyment of the hours as they come.

In the outward form of our life we are hardly distinguishable from Bushmen; but whereas the latter can be so always, because they are so truly, and at best may develop further by exertion of their spiritual forces, with us it is the reverse; — our inner forces are not exerted toward regeneration, but toward degeneration.

He had headed toward Germany, that was hopeless, of course — and, of course, he did everything else just as idiotically. Anyone might have known that his flight was only homesickness and a momentary aberration.

Before he died he handed over his pocket-book to me, and bequeathed me his boots — the same that he once inherited from Kemmerich.

But we are emaciated and starved. Our food is bad and mixed up with so much substitute stuff that it makes us ill.

Then the heat sinks heavily into our shell-holes like a jellyfish, moist and oppressive and on one of these late summer days, while bringing food, Kat falls.

Do you remember, Kat, how we commandeered the goose?

My throat is parched; everything dances red and black before my eyes, I stagger on doggedly and pitilessly and at last reach the dressing station.