All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

The poor, simple folks were actually the most sensible; they saw the war as a disaster from the start, while those who were better off were so happy, they couldn’t help rejoicing, even though they, of all people, could have understood the consequences much sooner.

There were thousands of Kantoreks who were all convinced that they were doing what was best in whatever way was convenient for them. But that’s precisely where their bankruptcy lies, in our view. For us eighteen-year-olds, those people were supposed to serve as mediators and guides to the world of adulthood, to the world of work, duty, culture, and progress, to the future. Sure, we sometimes mocked them and played little tricks on them, but fundamentally we believed them. In our minds, the concept of authority that they represented was associated with greater insight and more humane forms of knowledge. But the first corpse we saw shattered that conviction. We had to recognize that our own age was more honest than theirs; their only advantage over us was their rhetoric and skill. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and beneath it, the whole worldview they’d taught us collapsed.

He looks awful, yellow and pale, you can already see strange lines on his face, those lines we know so well because we’ve seen them a hundred times. They’re not really lines, more like signs. There’s no life pulsing beneath his skin anymore; it’s already been pushed out to the edges of his body, death is working its way out from the inside, you can see it in his eyes even now.

he’s still here, but then again, he’s not here anymore, his image has become washed-out and indistinct, like a photographic plate that’s been double-exposed. Even his voice sounds like ashes.

Kemmerich nods. I can barely look at his hands, they look like wax. The dirt of the trenches is under his nails, it looks blue-black, like poison.

It occurs to me that those nails will continue to grow long after Kemmerich has stopped breathing—uncanny, underground growths. I see the image before my eyes: They twist into corkscrews and grow and grow, and the hair on his decaying skull grows with them, like grass on fertile ground, just like grass, how is that possible?

Iron youth. Youth! None of us are more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That’s ancient history. We’re old people now.

All we know for the time being is that we’ve become coarsened in a strange and melancholy way, though we rarely even feel sad anymore.

We’ve lost our sense for other concerns, because they’re artificial. Only the facts are right and relevant for us. And good boots are hard to come by.

We learned that a polished button is more important than four volumes of Schopenhauer. We were initially astonished, then bitter, and finally indifferent as we recognized that it was not the mind or spirit that mattered most, but the shoeshine brush, not the thought, but the system, not freedom, but the drill.

We had become soldiers with enthusiasm and goodwill; but they did everything they could to drive it out of us.

In the process, we must have been subjected to every abuse the barrack-yard has ever seen, and we often howled with rage. Some of us got sick from it, too, Wolf even died of pneumonia. But we would’ve felt ridiculous if we’d given in. We became hard, mistrustful, pitiless, vindictive, coarse—and that was good; because those were just the qualities we’d been lacking. If we’d been sent to the trenches without that training period, most of us would’ve gone insane. But this way we were prepared for what lay in store for us.

But he just cries, with his head turned to the side. He doesn’t talk about his mother and his brothers and sisters, he doesn’t say anything, it’s probably all behind him already; now he’s alone with his little nineteen-year-old life, and he’s crying because it’s leaving him.

The earth is flooded with forces that flow into me through the soles of my feet. There’s an electric crackling in the night, the front is thundering dully like a drum corps. My limbs move smoothly, my joints feel strong, I huff and puff. The night is alive, I’m alive. I feel hunger, a greater hunger than from the stomach alone.—

for me, the front is an uncanny vortex. Even when you’re still far from its center, in the calm water, you can already feel the current drawing you in, slowly, inexorably, with little resistance. But powers of defense flow to us from the earth, from the air—most of all from the earth. No one needs the earth as much as the soldier does. When he presses himself against it long and hard, when he burrows into it deeply with his face and limbs in the mortal fear of fire—then it is his only friend, his brother, his mother, he moans in fear and cries into its silence and its security, it accepts these offerings and releases him again for ten more seconds of flight and life, then grasps him again, sometimes forever.

It’s gotten quite dark by now. We skirt a small grove of trees and arrive at our section of the front. An indistinct reddish glow stretches along the horizon from one end to the other. It’s constantly in motion, punctuated by flashes from the muzzles of the artillery. Star shells shoot up into the air above it, silver and red balls that burst and rain down in white, green, and red stars. French rockets rise up, unfurl their silk parachutes in the air, and very slowly float down. They illuminate everything as bright as day, their light reaches us, we can see our shadows sharply on the ground. They float for several minutes before they burn out. And then, immediately, more of them shoot up everywhere, with the green, red, and blue ones mixed in. “Mayhem,” says Kat.

The screaming continues. It isn’t people, they can’t scream that horribly. Kat says: “Wounded horses.” I’ve never heard horses scream before, and I can hardly believe it. It’s all the misery in the world, the martyred animal, a wild, dreadful pain that we hear in those cries. We turn pale. Detering stands up. “Knacker, knacker! Just shoot them!” He’s a farmer, he knows horses. It hits close to home for him. As if on cue, the fire almost falls silent. The screaming of the animals gets that much clearer. We can’t tell anymore where it’s coming from in this silvery landscape that’s suddenly turned quiet, it’s invisible, ghostly, it’s everywhere between heaven and earth, it swells beyond measure—Detering loses his temper and yells: “Shoot ’em, shoot ’em, for God’s sake!”

Detering walks off, cursing: “I’d like to know what they’re guilty of.” Then he comes back again. His voice is agitated, it sounds almost like a proclamation when he says: “I’m telling you, it’s the dirtiest trick of all that animals are sent to war.”

“There’s no such thing as peace!”

Albert spells it out: “The war’s made us no good for anything.” He’s right. We’re not young men anymore. We no longer want to take the world by storm. We’re fugitives. We’re fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we were just beginning to love the world, to love life; then we had to shoot at it. The first shell that landed hit us in the heart. Now we’ve shut ourselves off from action, from striving, from progress. We no longer believe in all that; we believe in the war.

The sounds from outside blend into a loop, a dream, but they retain a trace of memory. In my half sleep, I watch Kat raise and lower the spoon, I love him, his shoulders, his angular, bent figure—and at the same time I see forests and stars behind him, and a kind voice speaks words that give me peace—me, a soldier who follows the path that lies before him with his big boots and his waist belt and his haversack, so small beneath the high heavens, who quickly forgets and rarely feels sad anymore, who keeps walking on and on beneath the great night sky.

the front is a cage that contains us as we wait anxiously to see what happens. We lie beneath the bars—the arcs traced by the shells across the sky—and we live with the suspense of the unknown.

Another night. By now we’re numb from the tension. It’s a deadly tension that scratches along our spines like a jagged knife. Our legs are about to give out, our hands are trembling, our bodies are just a thin skin stretched over the madness we’ve been working so hard to suppress, over an endless, irrepressible roar that’s just on the verge of erupting.

We’ve turned into dangerous animals. We’re not fighting, we’re defending ourselves against annihilation. We’re not hurling our grenades at people, what do we know about people in this instant, when death is rushing after us with hands and helmets, after these three days we can finally look death in the face for the first time, after these three days we can finally defend ourselves against it, we’re filled with a furious rage, we’re not lying impotently on the scaffold and waiting anymore, now we can destroy and kill to save ourselves, to save and avenge ourselves.

It’s strange that all the memories that come back to me share two qualities. They’re always filled with tranquility, that’s their foremost feature, and even if they weren’t so quiet in reality, they seem that way now. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me in glances and gestures, wordless and silent—and their silence is what makes them so unsettling, prompting me to reach out and touch my sleeve and my rifle in order not to let myself drift away, not to give in to that temptation for release, not to allow my body to spread out and softly dissolve into the silent forces behind all things.

That silence is the reason that the images of the past arouse not so much longing as sadness—a profound, overwhelming melancholy. These are things that once existed—but they will not return. They are done for, they are another world that is no longer there for us.

But here in the trenches, this memory is lost to us. It no longer rises up out of us; we are dead, and it stands remote on the horizon, it is an apparition, an enigmatic reflection that haunts us, that we fear and hopelessly love. The memory is strong, and our desire is strong; but it is unattainable, and we know it.

We are abandoned like children and experienced like old men, we are raw and sad and superficial—I think we are lost.

The horror can be endured as long as you just duck

the horror of the front drops away when we turn our backs on it, we fight it with cruel and black humor; when someone dies, we say he’s pushing up daisies, and that’s how we talk about everything, it keeps us from going crazy; as long as we take it like that, we can put up a fight.

We don’t do it because we have a sense of humor; we have a sense of humor because without it we’d be broken. Even so, this trick won’t work forever, the humor gets more bitter with each passing month.

And I know that all the things that sink down inside us like stones for now, as long as we’re at war, will awaken again when the war is over, and only then will the life-and-death struggle begin.

There are a few flowers on the table. Fountain pens, pencils, a seashell for a paperweight, the inkwell—nothing here has changed.

I’m worked up; but I don’t want to be, because that isn’t right. I want to feel that quiet rapture again, that fierce, nameless urge I used to feel when I stood in front of my books. I want to be seized again by the wind of wishes that blew from the colorful spines of the books, I want it to melt the heavy, dead block of lead that lies somewhere inside me, and to awaken within me again that impatience for the future, that elated joy in the world of ideas; I want it to bring back to me the lost eagerness of my youth.

The spines of the books stand side by side. I still know them and remember how I arranged them. I beg them with my eyes: Speak to me—take me in—take me in, you past life—you carefree, beautiful life—take me in again— I wait, I wait. Images pass by, they don’t last, they are only shadows and memories. Nothing—nothing. My unease is growing. A terrible feeling of alienation suddenly rises up in me. I can’t find my way back, I’m shut out; no matter how I might beg and strive, nothing changes, I sit there indifferent and sad, like a condemned man, and the past turns away. At the same time, I’m afraid to conjure it up too much, because I don’t know what might happen if I do.

If only they didn’t look at us like that—how much misery can be found in two small spots, so small they can be covered by a thumb: in the eyes.

I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners, and that is what disturbs me. Their life is nameless and guiltless; if I knew more about them—what their names are, how they live, what they expect, what weighs upon them—then my dismay would have a purpose and could become compassion. But now the only thing that I can sense behind those faces is the pain of the living creature, the terrible melancholy of life, and the mercilessness of mankind.

The sound of the violin rises up above them like a slender girl, luminous and lonely. The voices stop, and the violin remains—it is thin in the night, as if it were freezing; you have to stand close by to hear it, it would probably sound better indoors; out here, it makes you sad, the way it wanders around so utterly alone.

I could almost cry. I don’t know who I am anymore.

How senseless is everything that was ever written, done, or thought, if such a thing is possible! All of that must amount to nothing but lies and trifles, if even the culture of millennia could not prevent the shedding of these rivers of blood, the existence of these hundreds of thousands of dungeons of agony. It is the military hospital that shows what war truly is.

Here on the threshold of death, life follows a terribly simple path, it’s limited to the most necessary things, everything else lies in a profound slumber; that may be primitive, but it’s also our salvation. If we were more sophisticated, we would’ve either gone insane, deserted, or fallen in battle long ago.

expressions of life are permitted only insofar as they contribute to the preservation of life, and they are necessarily directed toward that end. Everything else is forbidden, because it would consume energy unnecessarily. This is the only way for us to save ourselves, and I often sit before myself as if before a stranger, when in silent hours the mysterious reflection of the past, like a tarnished mirror, reveals the outlines of my present existence as something outside of me, and then I marvel at how this nameless, active thing that we call life has adapted itself to even this form. All other sorts of expression are hibernating, life is nothing but a constant vigil against the threat of death; it has turned us into thinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct; it has dulled our senses to keep us from cracking when faced with the horror that would overtake us if we were thinking clearly; it has awakened in us a sense of camaraderie, so that we may escape the abyss of loneliness; it has given us the indifference of savages, so that in spite of everything, we may perceive each positive moment and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. Thus, we live a closed, hard existence, a life confined to the very surface, and only occasionally does something happen that strikes sparks. But then, all of a sudden, a flame of heavy and terrible longing pierces us.

And when we awake at night from a dream, overwhelmed and in thrall to the spell of those visions that flood over us, we feel with horror how thin the boundary and bulwark is that separates us from the darkness—we are small flames, and we have only weak walls that offer us meager protection from the storm of dissolution and absurdity in which we flicker and sometimes nearly drown. Then the muffled roar of battle becomes a ring that encloses us, we huddle together and stare wide-eyed into the night. We find our only consolation in the sound of our sleeping comrades’ breath, and in that state, we wait for morning.

I’m very calm. Let the months and years come as they may, they will take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I’m so alone, so devoid of expectations, that I can face them without fear. The life that carried me all these years is still there in my hands and eyes. I don’t know if I’ve overcome it. But so long as it is there, it will seek its way, whether this thing within me that says “I” wants it to or not.