Erich Maria Remarque. Black Obelisk (№ 445971)

The strange change that began shortly after the armistice continues. The war, which almost all the soldiers in 1918 hated, for those who survived safely, gradually turned into the greatest event in life. They returned to everyday existence, which seemed to them, when they were still lying in the trenches and cursing the war, some kind of paradise. Now everyday life has come again with their worries and troubles, and the war is remembered as something vague, distant, obsolete, and therefore, against their will, it looks completely different, it is tinted and replaced. The massacre was presented as an adventure from which it was possible to emerge unscathed. Calamities are forgotten, grief is enlightened, and the death that spared you has become what it almost always happens in life - something abstract, already unreal. It is a reality only when it hits someone very close by or reaches out to us.