All Quiet on the Western Front

by Erich Maria Remarque

He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him. This is the most disturbing and hardest parting that I ever have seen,

He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.

It is the common fate of our generation. Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

We go up to the front two days earlier than usual. On the way we pass a shelled school-house. Stacked up against its longer side is a high double wall of yellow, unpolished, brand-new coffins. They still smell of resin, and pine, and the forest. There are at least a hundred. “That’s a good preparation for the offensive,” says Müller astonished. “They’re for us,” growls Detering. “Don’t talk rot,” says Kat to him angrily. “You be thankful if you get so much as a coffin,” grins Tjaden, “they’ll slip you a waterproof sheet for your old Aunt Sally of a carcase.” The others jest too, unpleasant jests, but what else can a man do?--The coffins are really for us. The organisation surpasses itself in that kind of thing.

They prepare more for the dead than the live soldier-- to the public, they only see how you treat the dead, and the public image is the most important. You can blame a soldier's death on someone else (namely, on the enemy), so you can ignore them however you like when they're alive. The point being: maybe if they spent all themoney they used on coffins to help the soldiers still alive, it would be more meaningful.

It is this Chance that makes us indifferent. A few months ago I was sitting in a dug-out playing skat; after a while I stood up and went to visit some friends in another dug-out. On my return nothing more was to be seen of the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back to the second and arrived just in time to lend a hand digging it out. In the interval it had been buried. It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bombproof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

We put the dead in a large shell-hole. So far there are three layers, one on top of the other. Suddenly the shelling begins to pound again. Soon we are sitting up once more with the rigid tenseness of blank anticipation. Attack, counter-attack, charge, repulse--these are words, but what things they signify!

terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;--but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

We take leave of one another. “Good luck, Kat: good luck, Albert.” They go off and wave once or twice. Their figures dwindle. I know their every step and movement; I would recognise them at any distance. Then they disappear. I sit down on my pack and wait.

I hear we have become one of the flying divisions that are pushed in wherever it is hottest. That does not sound cheerful to me.

“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. 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? 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.” It is quiet, the front is still except for the crackle of rifle fire.

A man cannot realise that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army.

Our fresh troops are anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely know how to die. By thousands. They understand nothing about warfare, they simply go on and let themselves be shot down.

The rifles are caked, the uniforms caked, everything is fluid and dissolved, the earth one dripping, soaked, oily mass in which lie yellow pools with red spiral streams of blood and into which the dead, wounded, and survivors slowly sink down.

On the way without my having noticed it, Kat has caught a splinter in the head. There is just one little hole, it must have been a very tiny, stray splinter. But it has sufficed. Kat is dead. Slowly I get up. “Would you like to take his paybook and his things?” the lance-corporal asks me. I nod and he gives them to me. The orderly is mystified. “You are not related, are you?” No, we are not related. No, we are not related. Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died.

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.