F’s Reviews > All Quiet on the Western Front > Status Update
F
is on page 215 of 276
The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. (1/?)
— Apr 22, 2026 08:42AM
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F’s Previous Updates
F
is on page 216 of 276
If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up--take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now." (3/3)
What a book. The blueprint for all war fiction.
— Apr 22, 2026 08:43AM
What a book. The blueprint for all war fiction.
F
is on page 216 of 276
I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? (2/?)
— Apr 22, 2026 08:43AM
F
is on page 161 of 276
Regarding talking about the war with his father: "I realise 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?"
— Apr 21, 2026 10:46AM
become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?"
F
is on page 90 of 276
"He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."
— Apr 21, 2026 07:24AM
