Mark André ’s Reviews > All Quiet on the Western Front > Status Update

I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right. I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, . . . and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, . . . the lost eagerness of my youth.

So I confine myself to telling him a few amusing things. But he wants to know whether I have had a hand-to-hand fight. I say “No,” and get up and go out.

I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades—word’s, word’s, but they hold the horror of the world.

Their sharp, downy, dead faces have the awful expressionlessness of dead children.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Their stillness is the reason why theses memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy.
[. . .]
. . . they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we know it.

We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the enemy. We lie for an hour panting and resting before anyone speaks. We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.

Our legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness, over an almost irresistible, bursting roar.

Towards morning, while it is still dark, there is some excitement. Through the entrance rushes in a swarm of fleeing rats that try to storm the walls. Torches light up the confusion. Everyone yells and curses and slaughters. The madness and despair of many hours unloads itself in this outburst. Faces are distorted, arms strike out, and the beasts scream; we just stop in time to avoid attacking one another.