Book: On the Western front without changes

- Strange after all, as you think, because why are we here? To defend their fatherland. But the French are also here to defend their fatherland. So who's right?
- Maybe we and them.
- Well, let's say so, but our professors, pastors, and newspapers claim that only we are right (let's hope that this is the case), and at the same time their professors, pastors, and newspapers claim that only they are right. So, what's the big deal?

- Perhaps so, but after all, they just wanted her to be.

And I know: everything that settles like a stone in our souls now, while we are at war, will emerge in them later, after the war, and then a big conversation about these things will begin, on which it will depend on whether we will live on or not live.

We want to live, to live at all costs; we cannot burden ourselves with feelings that may adorn a person in peacetime, but are completely inappropriate and false here.

You see, if you teach a dog to eat potatoes, and then put a piece of meat on it, it will still grab the meat, because it is in its blood. And if you give a person a piece of power, it will be the same with him: he will grab onto it. This happens by itself, because a person as such is, first of all, a beast, and unless he has a layer of decency on top, is like a crust of bread on which bacon has been smeared. All military service consists in the fact that one has power over the other. The only bad thing is that everyone has too much of it.

We are always too late to see clearly.

I think it's probably something like a fever. Nobody like and wants, and look, she is already here as here. We do not want war, others say the same thing, and yet almost the whole world got involved in it.

Barrage. Barrage. Curtain of fire. Mines. Gaza. Tanks. Machine guns. Hand grenades. It's all words, words, but behind them all the horrors facing humanity.

Attack, counter, strike, counterstrike, all of this words, but how much lies behind them!

Over us is a curse - cult of facts. We distinguish things as traders, and understand the need as butchers. We have ceased to be carefree, we have become terrifyingly indifferent. Let's say that we stay alive; but whether we live?
We are helpless as lost children, and experienced like old men, we have become callous, and miserable, and superficial - it seems to me that we will not be reborn.

...all we do is play cards, swear and fight. Not much for twenty - for twenty years.

Two years in a row to shoot a rifle and throw grenades - it is impossible to throw off, shed like dirty underwear...

- What will become of us when we get back? - asks Muller, and even he is not alone.
Kropp shrugs:
I do not know. First, we need to stay alive, but we'll see.

The front seems to me a sinister maelstrom. Still far away from the centre, in calm waters already begin to feel the force with which he draws you into his funnel, slowly, inexorably, almost completely paralyzing all resistance.