Three Comrades

by Erich Maria Remarque

he was used to her, and for a bookkeeper habit can be more than love.

“Nothing is lost yet,” I repeated. “A human being is lost only when he is dead.”

The truth is always too brutal, almost intolerable, to injured feelings.

“So long as a man doesn’t give in, he is still more than his fate. “That’s an old army rule.”

“It’s not courage with me, darling,” she murmured. “With me it is simply fear—miserable fear of the great last fear.”

“I learned in the Army not to worry more than is useful,” replied Köster. “And that’s plenty.

So this was Rosa’s idol. He looked as if he had come straight from gaol. I searched in vain for something that might have explained Rosa’s infatuation. But perhaps that was the explanation. It is extraordinary what these diamond-hard judges of men do fall for.

Rejuvenated, treading on air, she rocked out of the room. Once more she had someone to hand over her money to, so that he could drink it and then beat her afterwards. She was happy.

“Nothing?” said he then. “Nothing? That’s a great deal. Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”

“To compensate, you do belong to an order, brother—the order of the unsuccessful, the unsound fellows with their desires without purpose, their ambition that brings in nothing, their love without prospect, their despair without reason.”

“The secret brotherhood that prefers to go under rather than make a career, that will sooner gamble, lose, trifle their life

away than forget or industriously falsify the unattainable picture—the picture they carry in their hearts, brother, indelibly engraved there in the hours, the days, the nights when there was noth...

“Pros’t, boys! Because we’re alive. Because we breathe. Because we’re so conscious of life that we don’t know which end to begin.”

“Only the unhappy man appreciates happiness.

Drink, my boys. There are stars still shining that blew up ten thousand light-years ago. Drink while there is yet time. Long live unhappiness. Long live the dark.”

“Pity is the most useless article in the world,” said I irritably. “It’s the reverse side of gloating, you ought to know that.

“You silly ass,” said I. “Why, now you’ve found out something. Do you suppose you’re alone in your wonderful wisdom? Of course there’s no object. One doesn’t live for a purpose, anyway. It’s not so simple as that these days.

“Beethoven is still Beethoven,” he declared. No one contradicted.

“It’s not the world that’s crazy,” said I. “It’s the people in it.”

“That’s right,” declared Gottfried. “Just what my mother used to tell me before she was married—the bad live to be old. Mortality is man’s invention; not in the logic of life.”

And what’s more if the police did find him, I’d swear it wasn’t he, so I could get him after. Gottfried dead and he alive … We’re having none of that.”

“The worst part is the waiting and not being able to do anything. It drives you crazy and does you in.”

With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.

“Friends—well, you know.” He laughed scornfully. “When you suddenly have no more money, they hop away like fleas off a dead man.”

“Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco, darling.”

“Do what you will,” said I, “you will never be hideous. For me you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”