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

Instead of going to Russia, we go up the line again. On the way we pass through a devastated wood with the tree trunks shattered and the ground plowed up.
At several places there are tremendous craters. “Great guns, something’s hit that,” I say to Kat. “Trench mortars,” he replies, and then points up at one of the trees.
In the branches dead men are hanging.

We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing—-and yet half the world is in it all the same.”
“But there are more lies told by the other side than by us,” say I; “just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it says that we eat Belgian children. The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves. They are the real culprits.

Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.
Kay shrugs his shoulders. “ There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”
“Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.
“Not you, nor anybody else here.”
“Who are they then?” persists Tjaden.
“ . . . every full-grown emperor requires at least one wR, otherwise he would not become famous.”
“And generals too,” adds Detering, “they become famous through war.

If only they would not look at one so—-What great misery can be in two such small spots, no bigger than a man’s thumb—-in their eyes!

May I never come back if he wasn’t killed instantaneously.”
I would swear to anything. But she seems to believe me. She moans and weeps steadily. I have to tell how it happened, so I invent a story and I almost beleve it myself.

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.