Status Updates From Na západní frontě klid

What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.

In the first few pages I have 2 thoughts. 1: I have learned a young German soldier smokes 40 cigarettes a day. That’s 2 packs per day! 2: I am already filled with a sense of sadness at the youth of the soldiers. The main characters who just survived the front line of WWI are only 19 years old.

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.

If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother like Kat and Albert.

They are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing this is anywhere: they are the voice of my comrades.