Status Updates From Eight Stories: Tales of War...

Johann Bartok, an engineer's fitter, had been five months married when war broke out. He was called up at once and sent to join an Austrian garrison on the frontier.

Annette Stoll grew up in a small university town in central Germany. She was fresh, fair complexioned little girl, light of heart and prone to laughter, attending school with moderate zeal and very fond of sweets and moving pictures. The playmate of her childhood was young Gerhard Jager, some three years older than herself, thin and lanky, with a partiality for books and serious discussions.

Above these fields the lost years seem to stand, the years that have not been fulfilled—the call of the unlived life, that finds no rest—the cry of youth quenched too soon, in full career come to its end. Surely at night they burst up from the earth like ghostly blue fire.

And this feeling, so strangely compounded out of happiness, pain, melancholy, grief, desire and hopelessness, was the common experience of a soldier out resting.

[...] the novel had its characters living, fighting, and dying in the inescapable present tense that made the war oppressively present to the reader, as well as shockingly real. The stories that began to appear in Collier’s between 1930 and 1934 did something uncannily different: they looked back on the wartime experience as something remembered across the passage of the decade.