All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque's novel follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier on the Western Front during World War I, as he and his comrades endure the physical and spiritual destruction of trench warfare. Written in the first person with stark, unsentimental prose, it is neither accusation nor confession but simply the testimony of a generation that was annihilated by war — even those who survived the shells.

Chapter I

We are at rest five miles behind the front, and our bellies are full of beef and haricot beans. We are satisfied and at peace. The cook with his carroty head is begging us to eat. He has cooked for a hundred and fifty men — the full strength of the Second Company — but on the last day in the line an astonishing number of English field-guns opened up on us with high-explosive, and we came back only eighty strong. Tjaden and Müller have filled wash-basins as reserves. Double rations of smokes too: ten cigars, twenty cigarettes, two quids of chew per man. I have exchanged my tobacco with Katczinsky for his cigarettes, so I have forty. Enough for a day.

The cook refused at first to serve rations for a hundred and fifty to eighty men. Ginger said it wasn't regulation. We grew heated. Katczinsky demanded he be generous: "You've drawn food for the Second Company. Good. Let's have it. We are the Second Company." The dispute might have turned ugly, but our company commander appeared, heard the facts, lifted the lid from the dixie, sniffed, and said: "Serve out the whole issue. We can do with it." Ginger looked sheepish. Tjaden danced around him, and of his own free will the cook shared out half a pound of synthetic honey to each of us.

Our gang: little Albert Kropp, the clearest thinker among us and therefore the first to make lance-corporal; Müller, who still carries his school textbooks and dreams of examinations, muttering propositions in physics during bombardments; Leer, who wears a full beard and has a preference for the girls from officers' brothels; and myself, Paul Bäumer. All four are nineteen, all four joined up from the same class as volunteers. Behind us come Tjaden, a skinny locksmith of our own age, the biggest eater in the company — he sits down thin as a grasshopper and gets up big as a bug in the family way. Haie Westhus, a peat-digger who can hold a ration-loaf in one fist. Detering, a peasant who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife. And Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years old, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs.

We settle in the meadow behind the billets. On the right side a large common latrine has been built, but that is for recruits. We drag individual boxes into a ring and sit down comfortably for two hours, reading mail and playing skat. Once we were embarrassed by such things; in barracks twenty men sat side by side without doors, so they could be reviewed at a glance. Since then we have learned better. The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary comes from these regions. Not for nothing was the word "latrine-rumour" invented.

Over us is the blue sky. Observation balloons float on the horizon. The muffled rumble of the front sounds as distant thunder, drowned by the droning of bumblebees. Grasses sway their tall spears, white butterflies flutter, red field-poppies glow. We read letters and papers and smoke. Someone says, "Well, boys..." and for a moment we fall silent. There is in each of us a feeling of constraint. It might easily have happened that we should not be sitting here today. And so everything is new and brave — poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.

Kropp asks about Kemmerich. He is at St. Joseph's with a flesh wound in his thigh, a good blighty. We decide to visit. Kropp pulls out a letter: "Kantorek sends you all his best wishes." We laugh bitterly. Müller throws his cigarette away: "I wish he was here."

Kantorek was our schoolmaster, a small active man with a face like a shrew-mouse. He lectured us with such fervor that our whole class volunteered. One who hesitated was Josef Behm, a plump, homely fellow, who allowed himself to be shamed into enlisting because no one could stand out — even one's parents were ready with the word "coward." The wisest were just the poor and simple people; they knew the war was a misfortune. Behm became one of the first to fall. He was hit in the eye during an attack and left for dead. That afternoon we heard him calling and saw him creeping toward us, blinded and mad with pain. He was shot down before anyone could reach him.

For us lads of eighteen, teachers like Kantorek should have been mediators and guides to maturity. We made fun of them but in our hearts trusted them. The idea of authority they represented meant greater insight and manlier wisdom. But the first death shattered this belief. They surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it broke in pieces. While they wrote and talked, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.

We go to see Kemmerich. The dressing station reeks of carbolic, ether, and sweat. He lies in a large room, his watch stolen while he was unconscious. Müller shakes his head about the watch, then eyes a pair of fine English lace-up boots of soft yellow leather reaching to the knee. Will Kemmerich take them with him? We all three have the same thought: even if he gets better, he can use only one. They are no use to him now. But Kemmerich won't part with them. I tread on Müller's foot and he puts them back under the bed.

I think of Kemmerich's mother weeping at the station, imploring me to look after her boy. He had a face like a child, such frail bones that after four weeks of pack-carrying he had flat feet. But how can a man look after anyone in the field? His leg has been amputated, though he does not know it yet. Death is already working through from within — it has command in his eyes. His features have become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate with two exposures. We promise to return in the morning. Müller is thinking of the boots and means to be on the spot.

We walk back in silence. Kropp suddenly stamps on his cigarette and stammers: "Damned shit, the damned shit!" We understand. He sees red; out here every man gets like that sometime. Kantorek writes that we are the "Iron Youth." Iron Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.

Chapter II

At home in my writing table lies the beginning of a play called "Saul" and a bundle of poems. That has become so unreal I cannot comprehend it any more. Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here. All the older men are linked to their previous lives — wives, children, occupations. We young men of twenty have only our parents and perhaps a girl. Beyond school our life did not extend, and of that nothing remains.

Kantorek would say we stood on the threshold of life. Perhaps so, but we had taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others it is an interruption; they can think beyond it. We have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

Müller's interest in Kemmerich's boots is not heartlessness — he merely sees things clearly. Were Kemmerich able to use them, Müller would rather go barefoot over barbed wire. But Kemmerich will die, and good boots are scarce. We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only facts are real.

We enlisted as a class of twenty young men, many shaving for the first time. In ten weeks of training we were more profoundly influenced than by ten years of school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer — not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. A braided postman had more authority than our parents, our teachers, the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.

Corporal Himmelstoss, a small undersized postman with a foxy waxed moustache, had a special dislike for Kropp, Tjaden, Westhus, and me. I remade his bed fourteen times in one morning. I kneaded prehistoric boots for twenty hours until they were soft as butter. I scrubbed the Corporals' Mess with a toothbrush. Kropp and I cleared the barrack-square of snow with a hand-broom and a dust-pan. I ran eight times from the top floor to the courtyard in my shirt because my drawers projected three inches over the edge of the stool. At bayonet practice he had a handy wooden weapon while I had a heavy iron one; he struck my arms blue. Once I ran at him blindly and knocked him down with a jab to the stomach. The company commander laughed at Himmelstoss. But the training was necessary. Had we gone into the trenches without it, most of us would have gone mad. It awakened in us esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war — comradeship.

One Sunday, lugging a latrine-bucket, Kropp and I tripped and emptied it over Himmelstoss's legs. He threatened us with clink, but Kropp said there would be an inquiry first. Himmelstoss retreated. But before that, he tried once more to break us with his "Prepare to advance — lie down" drill. We obeyed so slowly that he was hoarse in minutes. After that he left us in peace — still calling us swine, but with a certain respect.

Many of us became ill; Wolf died of inflammation of the lung. But we became hard, suspicious, pitiless, tough — and that was good, for we needed those qualities. We did not break down, but endured.

I sit by Kemmerich's bed again. He knows about the amputation now. He beckons me close and whispers: "I don't think so" — about going home. I try to talk him round. He points to his uneaten food. I urge him to eat. He turns away: "I wanted to become a head-forester once." Then quietly he gives me the boots for Müller.

His lips have fallen away, his teeth stick out like chalk, the skeleton working itself through. He is not the first I have seen die, but we grew up together — his brown coat at school, the giant's turn on the horizontal bar, his hair flying like silk. How frail he looked when we bathed, like a child. The room darkens. His face lifts from the pillow and gleams pale. He whispers about his watch. I talk to him as though words could save him — the convalescent home at Klosterberg, the fields like mother-of-pearl, the poplars by the Klosterbach where we caught sticklebacks. His face is wet from tears. An hour passes. He says nothing, speaks of no one — he is entirely alone with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.

Suddenly he groans and begins to gurgle. I run for the doctor. "How should I know anything about it," the surgeon snaps, "I've amputated five legs today." The orderly says this is the seventeenth death; there will be twenty altogether. Kemmerich is dead. The eyes are half open, yellow like old horn buttons. The orderly asks about his things; they need the bed — outside they are lying on the floor.

I collect his identification disc and go. Outside the door the darkness and wind are a deliverance. I breathe deep, the breeze warm and soft as never before. My feet begin to move, I run. The earth streams with forces through the soles of my feet. The night crackles, the front thunders. I feel a hunger greater than comes from the belly alone. I give Müller the boots. They fit.

Chapter III

Reinforcements arrive — twenty-five young men from a later draft, about two years younger than us. We stick out our chests and feel ourselves stone-age veterans. Kat is the key figure. He has a sixth sense for food and comfort. Drop him in a bare, empty camp and within half an hour he will return with bread, horse-flesh, straw for sleeping. By trade a cobbler, he understands all trades. In one factory billet where we starved, Kat vanished and returned with two loaves and a blood-stained sandbag full of horse-flesh. The artilleryman's pipe dropped from his mouth. Kat knows how to roast it tender: boil first in a little water, then fry. His masterpiece was four boxes of lobsters. He finds everything — stoves, wood, furniture — but above all food. It is uncanny. If for one hour in a year something eatable were to be had in one place only, he would walk directly there as though following a compass.

We sit in the sun. Kat is convinced the war continues because men in authority abuse their power. He illustrates: a dog trained on potatoes will still snap at meat. Give a man a little authority and he snaps at it too. The army is based on one man having power over the other, and each has much too much. Kropp proposes that a declaration of war should be a festival: ministers and generals in bathing-drawers with clubs, fighting it out. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be simpler and more just.

Then Tjaden appears, flushed with excitement: Himmelstoss is coming to the front. Tjaden has a special grudge — Himmelstoss tried to cure his bed-wetting by quartering him alternately above and below another bed-wetter, Kindervater, each man retaliating on the other. The method accomplished nothing; both men were sallow and unwell. One always ended up sleeping on the floor, catching cold.

Before we shipped out, we got our revenge. We waited for Himmelstoss on a dark road behind a pile of stones. I had a bed-cover. When he came, singing and unsuspecting, we threw it over his head. Haie Westhus shoved us aside to be first — he raised his coal-shovel hand and fetched a blow that felled Himmelstoss like an ox. Haie squatted on him and muffled his yells with a cushion, letting him breathe every so often. Tjaden pulled down his trousers and whipped him. It was a wonderful picture: Himmelstoss on the ground, Haie grinning with blood-lust, Tjaden indefatigable. Finally Haie stood him up and boxed his ears. Himmelstoss staggered, his striped postman's backside gleaming in the moonlight. We disappeared at full speed.

"Revenge is black-pudding," said Haie, satisfied and mysterious. Himmelstoss never discovered who did it, though he scored a bed-cover — it was gone when we returned to look.

Chapter IV

We go up on wiring fatigue. The motor lorries roll up after dark. We stand jammed together, shouldered to shoulder. The roads are worn and full of holes, we lurch and are almost pitched out. A broken arm is better than a hole in the guts. I hear the cackle of geese from a house by the road. A glance at Kat, a glance back — we understand. "It will be attended to when we come back," he says. "I have their number." Of course Kat has their number.

At the artillery lines the air becomes acrid, the fumes of powder bitter on the tongue. Our faces change imperceptibly. We are not in the front-line, only in the reserves, but in every face can be read: this is the Front, now we are within its embrace. It is not fear — men who have been up as often as we have become thick-skinned. But a contact has shot home in our blood: a tense waiting, a heightened alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. The body springs into full readiness.

To the soldier the earth means everything. When he presses himself into her from the fear of death, she is his friend, his brother, his mother. She shelters him and gives him a new lease of ten seconds of life. At the sound of shells we rush back a thousand years. By animal instinct we are led and protected — it is quicker and surer than consciousness. A man flings himself down without knowing why, and fragments fly over him harmlessly. Had he not obeyed that impulse he would be a heap of mangled flesh.

We march up, reach the zone where the front begins, and become human animals. We push on to the pioneer dump, load iron stakes and wire, and move forward. An uncertain red glow spreads along the skyline. Balls of light rise — silver and red spheres that rain down in showers of stars. French rockets drift down on silk parachutes. "Bombardment," says Kat. The thunder of guns swells to a single roar. The heavy shells boom like rutting stags. Searchlights sweep the sky like gigantic rulers; an airman is caught between them, hesitates, and falls.

We ram in stakes and spool barbed wire. Afterward most of us lie down. I fall asleep and wake to rockets and stars, and for a moment believe I am at a garden fête. Am I crying? I reach for my eyes — the silhouette of Katczinsky appears. "That was only a nose-cap, it landed in the bushes."

Then it begins in earnest. We crawl away. A shell lands among us. Two cry out. Green rockets: barrage. A fair-headed recruit buries his face in his hands, crawls under my arm. His shoulders heave like Kemmerich's. I stick his helmet on his behind — not for a jest, but because it's his highest part.

The fire lifts. Apparently an attack coming. I shake the recruit: "All over, kid!" He turns fiery red — gun-shy. "That's no disgrace," I say. "Many a man before you has had his pants full after the first bombardment."

Then the cries of the wounded horses begin. It is not men who could not cry so terribly. The moaning rolls between heaven and earth. Detering raves: "Shoot them! For God's sake!" One horse drags itself in circles on stiffened forelegs, its back broken, until a soldier shoots it. Detering says with almost dignified fury: "I tell you it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war."

On the return march, heavy shelling catches us in the open. We dive behind grave mounds in a cemetery. The dark goes mad. I crawl into a coffin for shelter, grasp a dead arm. Gas comes — "Gaas — Gaaas — Pass it on." I tear on my mask, help a recruit get his on, drop into a shell-hole. The gas creeps like a jellyfish. A bombardment resumes. A coffin crashes beside us, breaking a man's arm. We bandage him while my head booms and roars inside the mask.

When it lifts, the graveyard is wreckage. We find a wounded recruit — the fair-haired boy. His hip is one mass of mincemeat and bone splinters. This lad won't walk any more. He whimpers like a child: "Don't go away." Kat whispers: "Shouldn't we just take a revolver and put an end to it?" He will only live a few days in howling torture. I nod. But others are gathering, and we cannot. We get a stretcher. "Such a kid," says Kat. "Young innocents."

Five killed, eight wounded. We go back. The rain falls on us, on the dead, on Kemmerich's grave. It falls in our hearts. "Mind — wire" — our knees bend — we are half asleep.

Chapter V

We sit with our shirts on our knees delousing ourselves. Haie has lice with red crosses on their heads, from a surgeon-general at the hospital. But we are preoccupied: Himmelstoss has arrived. Tjaden has been planning his insults for hours.

Meanwhile Müller pursues his eternal question: what would you do in peacetime? Kropp says there won't be any. Haie dreams of a woman and a feather bed, then says he'd stay in the army — better than peat-digging, with regular meals and a clean bed. "You'll never be a non-com though, Haie," Kat interrupts, and Haie falls sadly silent. Detering says simply: "I would go straight on with the harvesting," then walks off. His wife is running the farm alone, with two horses already requisitioned.

Himmelstoss approaches. Tjaden's face turns red. No one stands up. Himmelstoss tries to reassert authority: "Stand up!" Tjaden replies in a classical phrase and ventilates his backside. Himmelstoss storms off to the Orderly Room.

Müller won't let it go. What would we actually do? We count up our class — out of twenty, seven dead, four wounded, one in a madhouse. Our school knowledge is useless: nobody taught us to light a cigarette in rain or that a bayonet jabs best in the belly. "The war has ruined us for everything," Kropp says. We were eighteen, had begun to love life, and had to shoot it to pieces.

The case goes to trial. Our decent lieutenant, Bertink, hears my testimony about the bed-wetting and lectures Himmelstoss. Tjaden gets three days open arrest; Kropp one day. Open arrest is pleasant — a fowl-house where we can visit. That night we play skat through the wire-netting.

Then Kat asks: "What do you say to some roast goose?" We climb on a munition-wagon, ride to a farmyard. I scale the wall, grab two geese in the dark, and fight them desperately — Lord, what a kick a goose has! A bulldog pins me to the floor. Inch by inch I reach my revolver, fire, and bolt over the wall with one goose. Kat is waiting. We roast it in a deserted lean-to while the front thunders outside.

We sit opposite one another, Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby coats, cooking a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much but I believe we have a more complete communion than even lovers have. We are two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. The grease drips from our hands, the hour is like the room — flecked with the lights and shadows of a quiet fire.

In a half-sleep I watch Kat dip the ladle. I love him — his shoulders, his angular stooping figure. Behind him I see woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring peace to a little soldier marching under the wide night sky, who has forgotten all else but marching. Beyond the skyline is a country with flowers, lying so still he would like to weep.

We carve off portions for Kropp and Tjaden. Tjaden holds a wing like a mouth-organ and gnaws: "May I never forget you!" We go to our hut. Stooping and angular, Kat walks beside me — my comrade. The outlines of the huts appear in the dawn like a dark, deep sleep.

Chapter VI

There are rumours of an offensive. On the way up we pass a wall of new coffins stacked against a shelled schoolhouse — at least a hundred, smelling of fir and forest. "That's a good preparation for the offensive," says Müller. "They're for us," growls Detering. Extra cheese, rum, bayonets overhauled — all the signs.

We hear enemy transports rolling ceaselessly behind their lines. New English batteries, trench-mortars, French instantaneous fuses. Our own shells fall short and wound two of our men. The front is a cage. Over us Chance hovers. A few months ago I left one dugout to visit another; the first was blown to pieces by a direct hit. I returned to the second and arrived just in time to dig it out from a burial. Every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

The rats become unbearable — fat corpse-rats with evil naked faces. They gnaw every man's bread. Detering suspends his from the ceiling by a wire, but in the morning a fat rat is riding on it. We heap bread scraps in the middle of the floor and ambush them with spades and torches. In the adjoining sector they attack two cats and a dog, bite them to death, and devour them.

Then the bombardment begins. We crouch in corners. The dugout heaves. The recruits are green and vomiting by morning. For days the shells fall without cease. We cannot speak, can hardly think. Our trench is pounded to eighteen inches high. A recruit goes mad — stares, grinds his teeth, then bolts for the door. We hold him. He raves: "Leave me alone, let me go out!" We have to beat him to bring him to his senses. Another rushes out and is torn apart by a shell.

Food cannot get through. We pull our belts tighter and chew every mouthful three times. The rats flee in swarms and we slaughter them in the madness and despair of many hours. A corporal gets through with a single loaf.

When the barrage lifts, the attack comes. We seize hand-grenades and leap from the dugout. Steel helmets appear on all sides. We become wild beasts. We do not fight — we defend ourselves against annihilation. We fling bombs at the French, who suffer heavily at the wire. A man's body falls into a wire cradle, his hands remain suspended as though praying; then his body drops clean away and only hands with shot-off arms hang in the wire.

We retreat, counterattack, charge again. Haie and Kropp throw grenades. I see a bearded face below a helmet and cannot throw for one mad moment — then my grenade flies into him. We become automata, raging and savage. Crouching like cats we run, overwhelmed by a wave of ferocity that multiplies our strength with fear and madness.

In the enemy trench we stumble over slippery lumps of flesh. Haie strikes his spade into a gigantic Frenchman's neck. I fall into an open belly. We seize their corned beef and butter — glorious rations — before retreating.

The days go by and attacks alternate with counter-attacks. The dead pile up in the field of craters. We listen to the wounded dying. For one of them we search two days in vain. He must be lying on his belly, mouth to the ground, so we cannot gauge the direction of his cry. Kat thinks he has a broken pelvis or a shot through the spine. The first night men go out three times but cannot find him. By the second day the calls are fainter — his lips and mouth must be dry. He talks with his wife and children in delirium; we catch the name Elise. By evening only croaking, but it persists through the whole night. In the morning, when we suppose he must have gone to his rest, there comes one last gurgling rattle.

The days are hot and the dead lie unburied, their bellies swollen like balloons, hissing and belching. The sky is blue and without clouds. When the wind blows toward us it brings the smell of blood, heavy and sweet. One morning two brimstone butterflies play in front of our trench, with red spots on their yellow wings. There is not a plant or flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull.

In the evening I am on sentry. My strength is exhausted as always after an attack, and my thoughts turn homeward. A parachute-light shoots up and I see a picture: a summer evening in the cathedral cloister, the tall rose trees in the little garden where the monks lie buried, the green spire ascending into a pale blue sky. Between the meadows behind our town stands a line of old poplars by a stream. Even as children we loved them; we sat on the bank and let our feet hang in the swift water. The pure fragrance and the melody of the wind in the poplars held our fancies. The image still makes my heart pause in its beating.

These memories are always completely calm. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me silently, and it is the alarm of their silence that forces me to grip my rifle lest I abandon myself to them. They are quiet because quietness is unattainable for us now. At the front there is no quietness. Their stillness is the reason they awaken not desire but sorrow — a strange, inapprehensible melancholy. Those desires belonged to another world that is gone from us. Even if those scenes were given back, we could never again take part in them as the same beings. We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe we are lost.

Days blur. The recruits die like flies — they cluster together, cannot distinguish shrapnel from high-explosive, are mown down by airmen. Their sharp downy dead faces have the expressionlessness of dead children. Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand. A gas attack catches a dugout full of them with blue heads and black lips.

Himmelstoss cowers in a dugout pretending to be wounded. I drag him out by the neck. "You lump, you hound!" A lieutenant yells "Forward!" and the word of command does what my banging could not. Himmelstoss springs up and outstrips the lieutenant.

Haie Westhus is dragged off with a wound through which the lung pulses at every breath. "It's all up, Paul," he groans. We see men living with skulls blown open, running on splintered stumps, a man holding the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours. The sun goes down, the shells whine, life is at an end.

When relieved, it is autumn. The morning is grey, the leaves rustle. The company commander calls the roll: "Second Company, this way!" The voices flutter out wearily — one, two, three, four — and cease at thirty-two. We came up a hundred and fifty. A line, a short line trudges off. Thirty-two men.

Chapter VII

They take us farther back for reorganization. Himmelstoss, with the bounce knocked out of him, makes peace and becomes acting cook — real officers' fare. Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget so quickly. Terror can be endured so long as a man ducks; it kills if he thinks about it. We turn into animals at the front because that is the only thing that brings us through; we turn into wags and loafers when resting because we cannot burden ourselves with feelings. Kemmerich dead, Haie dying, a hundred and twenty wounded — but what has it to do with us now? We live. Life is short.

The terror will surface again after the war. Our dead comrades will march with us, and we shall have a purpose — against whom, against whom?

We discover a poster of a girl in a light summer dress with a red patent-leather belt, white stockings, buckle shoes. A wonder to us. "Just look at those thin shoes though," I say, "she couldn't march many miles in those." We tear off the young man beside her and keep the girl. We get deloused and find clean shirts.

We swim naked in the canal and call to three Frenchwomen on the opposite bank. Tjaden holds up a loaf of army bread. That produces a great effect. We cannot cross the bridge — forbidden — so at night Leer, Kropp, and I swim across with bread, sausage, and cigarettes wrapped in newspaper, wearing only our boots. The women laugh at our appearance and throw us bits of clothing. They fall upon the food with shining eyes. The slim brunette strokes my hair: "La guerre — grand malheur — pauvres garçons."

I yield to a passion strangely compounded of yearning and misery. I feel giddy; nothing here to hold on to. No rifle, no belt, no tunic — nothing to recall the soldier's assurance. The words of this foreign tongue caress me to a quietness in which the room dissolves and only her face lives. How various is a face; an hour ago it was strange, and now it is touched with tenderness that comes from the night, the world, and the blood. I press deeper into the arms that embrace me, and for a moment believe my life depends on winning her.

Later, swimming back, I am not in the least happy. Tjaden, who we had plied with drink, has somehow appeared naked on the far bank clutching his own parcel.

I receive seventeen days leave plus a training course afterward. The others congratulate me. At the canteen I look at each in turn: Albert beside me smoking, Kat with his drooping shoulders, Müller with protruding teeth, Tjaden with mousey eyes, bearded Leer looking forty. Where would a soldier be without tobacco and beer?

The last night I visit the brunette. When I tell her I'm going on leave, not to the front, she loses interest. "Pauvre garçon" is for men going to die, not men going home. A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.

I travel by train. The landscape becomes familiar. The names of stations mark the boundaries of my youth. It is evening, and if the train did not rattle I should cry out. The poplars stand against the sky — unsubstantial, swaying, dark. A street crossing. Bremerstrasse. Below there are cyclists, lorries, men — the grey street embraces me as though it were my mother.

My sister opens the door: "Paul!" She calls for mother. I lean against the wall, rifle in one hand, helmet in the other, and cannot take another step. The tears run down my cheeks. My mother lies ill in her dim room. "Here I am, mother." She asks if I am wounded. No, just leave. "Here I lie now and cry instead of being glad."

She is very pale. My sister is making potato-cakes — my favourite — with whortleberries preserved for months. I sit by the bed and we say very little. "Dear boy," says my mother, and it means more than when another uses it. I know the jar of whortleberries is the only one they've had. A sense of strangeness will not leave me. There is my mother, my case of butterflies, the mahogany piano — but I am not myself there. There is a veil between us.

I unpack: an Edamer cheese from Kat, army bread, butter, liver-sausage, dripping, rice. My mother seizes my hand: "Was it very bad out there, Paul?" What should I answer? "No, mother, not so very."

My sister tells me it is probably cancer again. Several doctors have been to see her.

I wander through town. A major blusters at me for not saluting. He makes me march twenty paces backward and forward. I put on my civilian suit — tight and short, I've grown — and feel as though I have nothing on but a shirt. I look in the glass: a sunburnt, overgrown candidate for confirmation gazes at me.

In the beer-garden I sit under chestnuts. No bugles, no bombardments. But I cannot get on with the people. My father wants war stories; I find it dangerous to put those things into words. A schoolmaster lectures me on strategy, tells me I don't understand the big picture, that I should "shove ahead" and break through in Flanders. I pour the third beer into me and escape.

I sit in my old room among my books and beg them: speak to me, take me, Life of my Youth. Nothing stirs. Words, words, words — they do not reach me. I place the books back on the shelves. Nevermore.

I visit Mittelstaedt at the barracks and learn he has Kantorek under his command as a territorial — dressed in a faded blue tunic too large, breeches too short, a tiny pill-box cap. Mittelstaedt runs him through the "Change at Löhne" drill and squad-leader sprints until Kantorek is dashing like a wild boar. Then creeping practice on hands and knees, with Mittelstaedt quoting Kantorek's own patriotic speeches back at him.

I visit Kemmerich's mother. This quaking, sobbing woman shakes me and cries: "Why are you living when he is dead?" She drowns me in tears and demands to know how he died. I tell her he was shot through the heart and died instantaneously. She doubts me: "You lie. I know better. I have felt how terribly he died. I have heard his voice at night." She pleads gently: "Tell me the truth. You torment me far more than if you told me." I will never tell her. She asks me to swear, and I say: "May I never come back if he wasn't killed instantaneously." I would swear to anything. Good God, what is sacred to me? Such things change quickly with us. As I leave she kisses me and gives me a photograph of him — in his recruit's uniform, leaning on a rustic table with a painted wood behind him.

The days grow strained. I go with my sister to the butcher's for a pound of bones — a great luxury for which people line up early. After three hours the queue disperses; the bones have not lasted out.

The last evening. Everyone is silent. I go to bed early and bury my face in the pillow. Late in the night my mother comes. She sits long into the darkness though she is in pain, often writhing. I pretend to sleep, but at last cannot bear it. "Go and sleep, mother, you will catch cold." "I can sleep enough later." She asks gently: "Are you very much afraid?" "No, mother." She warns me about the women in France. I want to put my head in her lap and weep. Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled? In the wardrobe still hang my short boy's trousers — it is such a little time ago, why is it over? She has saved two pairs of woolen underpants for me, and I know what they cost her in waiting and walking and begging. On the landing I stumble over my pack, already made up for the early morning. I bite into my pillow. I ought never to have come on leave. Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless — I will never be able to be so again. I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end.

Chapter VIII

The training camp on the moors. I go through the routine mechanically. The birch woods are beautiful — stems gleaming white, pastel green shifting to opalescent blue as breezes pass. I often become lost in the play of light and nearly miss the commands.

Alongside our camp is a Russian prison compound separated by wire. The prisoners come across and pick over our garbage tins — and with us food is already scarce: turnips cut six ways and boiled in water, mouldy potatoes, thin rice soup. Only the dregs the ladle cannot reach go into the tins, along with turnip peelings and mouldy crusts. This thin, miserable garbage is the objective of the prisoners. They pick it greedily and go off with it under their blouses.

They have broad peasant faces, honest foreheads, broad noses and hands, thick hair. They ought to be threshing, reaping, apple-picking. They beg in soft, deep, musical voices like warm stoves and cosy rooms. Most have parted with everything and now trade little carvings made from shell fragments for a slice or two of bread. Our peasants are hard bargainers, holding food under their noses until greed overwhelms them, then wrapping up their booty and slowly cutting off a slice of their own bread to reward themselves. It is distressing to watch; one would like to crack them over their thick pates.

On guard at night I see their dark forms against the wire fence, their fingers hooked through the mesh, breathing the wind from the moors and the forest. They rarely speak, and then only a few words. They are more brotherly toward one another than we are — perhaps because they feel themselves more unfortunate. Their life is obscure and guiltless; if I could know their names, how they live, what they are waiting for, my emotion might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life, and the pitilessness of men.

A word of command made them our enemies; a word could make them friends. At some table a document is signed by persons none of us knows, and for years the very crime on which the world's condemnation once fell becomes our highest aim. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.

I am frightened. I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss. But I will not lose these thoughts — I will keep them until the war is ended. This is the aim, the sole aim: a task that will make life afterward worthy of these hideous years. I take out my cigarettes, break each in half, give them to the Russians. Red points glow in every face like little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace.

A musician among them plays violin while the others hum folk songs. The sound stands like a slender girl above a country of dark singing hills. In the night it sounds frozen.

The days pass. Almost every day one of the Russians is buried. I am on guard during a burial. The prisoners sing a chorale in parts — it sounds as if there were no voices but an organ far away on the moor. In the evening they stand again at the wire and the wind comes to them from the beech woods. The stars are cold.

My father and eldest sister come on a Sunday. We sit in the Soldiers' Home, then walk on the moors. The hours are a torture — we do not know what to talk about, so we speak of my mother's illness. It is now definitely cancer. She is in the Luisa Hospital, third class — she chose it herself because it was cheaper and she would have company. "Have you not asked what the operation costs?" I say. "Not directly," my father replies, "the surgeon might take it amiss, and he must operate on mother." That is how it is with all poor people: they don't dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully. And the dressings afterward are expensive. My father will stand at his desk folding and pasting until midnight, take a powder for his headache, and work on.

They give me jam and potato-cakes my mother made. I eat some in the evening, then start to give them to the Russians — but stop, remembering my mother standing in pain before the hot stove. I put the bag back in my pack and take only two cakes to them.

Chapter IX

I rejoin the company. Kat, Kropp, Müller, Tjaden — all still alive. I share the potato-cakes. "These are from your mother?" asks Kat, tasting. I could almost weep. This is where I belong.

The Kaiser comes for a review. We polish everything for eight days. He is smaller than his pictures, his voice not thundering. Tjaden is fascinated: "And would a king stand stiff for an emperor?" He cannot believe an emperor goes to the latrine like the rest of us. The conversation turns serious. Albert asks whether there would have been a war if the Kaiser had said No — or if twenty or thirty people in the world had. Tjaden wonders how a war gets started. "Mostly by one country badly offending another," says Albert. Tjaden pretends to be obtuse: "A country? A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." He means the people don't want it — the rulers do. Kat shrugs: "There must be some people to whom the war is useful." "Not you, nor anybody else here."

We return our new kit — the good things were for the inspection only — and go back up the line. In a devastated wood, dead men hang in the trees. A naked soldier squats in the fork of a tree, the top half only, his legs missing.

On patrol in no-man's-land I am seized by pure animal terror. My limbs glue to the earth. The sweat pours from me. Then I hear the voices of my comrades in the trench behind — these voices are more than motherliness and more than fear, they are the strongest, most comforting thing anywhere. I am no longer alone. I belong to them.

I crawl forward, lose my way, and end up in a shell-hole full of water during a bombardment. The enemy attack passes over me. A body crashes into the hole. I stab without thinking. The man gurgles. I cannot get out — machine-gun fire pins me down. For hours I lie beside the dying Frenchman. He has a small pointed beard. I give him water, bandage his wounds, whisper "Comrade, comrade, comrade." He dies in the afternoon.

In the unbearable silence afterward I speak to him: "I did not want to kill you. You were only an abstraction that lived in my mind. Now I see you are a man like me. I thought of your grenades, your bayonet. Now I see your wife and your face. Forgive me, comrade — if we threw away these rifles you could be my brother." His name is Gérard Duval, compositor. He has portraits of a wife and little girl. I promise to write, to live for his sake. But by evening, the lust to live flares up and I know I will keep none of these promises.

I crawl back at dusk, calling out so my comrades don't shoot me. Kat and Albert come with a stretcher. Back in the trench, I do not mention Duval. But next morning I must tell. "You can't do anything about it," they say. "That is what you are here for." The sniper Oellrich scores three kills from the fire-step. War is war.

Chapter X

Eight of us guard an abandoned village and its supply dump — Kat, Albert, Müller, Tjaden, Detering, our whole gang. Haie is dead, though. But we are mighty lucky all the same; all the other squads have had more casualties. It is a chance to stretch both legs and soul. We furnish our concrete cellar with mattresses, blankets, eiderdowns. Albert and I wrestle a mahogany bed with a blue silk canopy down the steps. Kat and I patrol houses and find eggs, butter — and two live sucking pigs. We slaughter them, make potato-pancakes, cauliflower in white sauce, coffee, cognac. Observation balloons spot our chimney smoke and the shells start falling, but we dash the food across in relays between explosions. I stay to fry my last four pancakes and sprint with the plate against my chest, making the cellar without losing one.

We feast from two in the afternoon until ten at night, then eat chocolate. For a fortnight we live like kings, smoking officers' cigars and treating one another like valets. Late one evening a little grey cat sits in the entrance. We entice it in and give it something to eat. On the day we leave, Albert and I erect the four-poster bed on a lorry, complete with canopy and lace coverlets. The cat rides with us in a parrot cage, purring before her saucer of meat. We ride away singing while the town burns behind us.

A few days later we are sent to evacuate a village. On the way we meet the fleeing inhabitants trundling their goods in wheelbarrows and perambulators, their figures bent, their faces full of grief and resignation. The children hold on to their mothers' hands; an older girl leads the little ones who stumble onward and keep looking back. A few carry dolls. All are silent as they pass us by.

Then a shell lands among the rear squad. I feel the instinctive alertness leave me — a throttling fear: "You are lost" — and a blow sweeps like a whip across my left leg. Albert cries out beside me. We stagger up and run. Albert seizes a branch; I heave him over a hedge by the leg, he cries out; I vault after him into a ditch. We wade neck-deep, ducking under the water at every shell. Albert has been hit in the knee, I in the leg and arm. Albert says if they take his leg he'll put an end to it. At the dressing station the surgeon pokes around in my wound — I try to punch him. "Chloroform the scoundrel!" he roars. I go quiet and let him work without anesthetic. He fishes out a piece of shell and says: "Tomorrow you'll be off home."

On the hospital train a nurse helps me into a bed with clean white linen. I hesitate — my shirt hasn't been washed in six weeks. "Because of the lice," I finally blurt out. She laughs. I fake a fever to stay with Albert — hold the thermometer at a slant, flip it with my forefinger, touch it with a match. 101.6°. We are put off together at a Catholic hospital. The sisters wake us for morning prayers at dawn with the door open. I count to three, then hurl a bottle into the corridor. Josef Hamacher claims responsibility — he has a "shooting licence," a certificate of periodic insanity. No one dares touch him.

Men come and go. Franz Wächter bleeds in the night; the night sister, grumbling from our earlier demands, takes too long to come. He is sent to the Dying Room — a small room at the corner of the building, two beds, beside the lift to the mortuary — and does not return. Little Peter with his shattered lung is wheeled away on the flat trolley. The sister makes the mistake of putting his tunic on the trolley too. Peter understands immediately and tries to roll off: "I won't go to the Dying Room!" His black curly head sways, his eyes full of tears: "I will come back again!" And he does — the one case Josef has ever seen. The chief surgeon operates on flat-footed soldiers for the joy of it, lecturing them until they consent, crippling them with club feet. A blind young musician seizes a fork from a sister's plate and drives it into his own heart with a shoe.

Albert's whole leg is amputated from the thigh. He hardly speaks. He says he will shoot himself the first chance he gets. On the floors below I find the abdominal and spine cases, jaw wounds, gas cases, blind men, double amputations. Here a man realizes in how many places he can be hit. Two men die of tetanus, their skin pale, limbs stiff, only their eyes stubbornly alive. A hospital alone shows what war is — hundreds of thousands of such chambers across Germany, France, Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood. I am twenty years old and know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. What would our fathers do if we came before them and proffered our account?

Lewandowski, forty, bedridden for ten months with an abdominal wound, receives his wife. We arrange the conjugal visit: two men guard the door, Albert holds the baby, we play skat noisily. The child squalls; the business is accomplished. Lewandowski beams. His wife goes around the room shaking pillows and handing out sausage, and we call her Mother.

I get convalescent leave. My mother is worse. Then back to the line. Parting from Albert Kropp is very hard.

Chapter XI

We count the weeks no more. War is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, only more frequent, more varied, and more terrible. Our thoughts are clay — good when we rest, dead under fire. We are coins of different provinces melted down to bear the same stamp. This life follows an amazingly simple course: limited to what is most necessary, all else buried in gloomy sleep. Were we more subtly differentiated we would have gone mad, deserted, or fallen.

We are little flames poorly sheltered against the storm of dissolution and madness, and sometimes almost go out. Then the muffled roar of battle becomes a ring that encircles us, and we stare into the night with big eyes. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep.

Detering sees a cherry tree in full blossom and is undone. He brings branches to his bed. That night I hear him packing. "Don't do anything silly, Detering." He deserts, heading for Germany — hopeless of course — and is caught by the field gendarmes. We hear nothing more of him.

Berger, maddened, runs out to rescue a wounded messenger-dog and is shot in the pelvis. The man who carries him back takes a bullet in the cheek.

Müller is killed — shot point-blank with a Verey light in the stomach. He lives half an hour, conscious, in terrible pain. He bequeaths me Kemmerich's boots. After me, Tjaden will get them.

Our lines fall back. Too many fresh English and American regiments. Too much corned beef and white bread. Too many guns and planes. We are emaciated and starved on substitute food that gives us dysentery. Our artillery barrels are worn, scattering shells into our own lines. Our fresh troops are anaemic boys who know only how to die. Tanks roll over us like invulnerable steel beasts. Shells, gas clouds, flotillas of tanks — shattering, starvation, death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave — there are no other possibilities.

Captain Bertinck falls. He crawls from a crater and, propped on his elbows under fire, shoots the rear man of a flame-thrower team. The hose slips and the other man burns. Bertinck takes a chest wound, then a fragment smashes his chin. The same fragment tears open Leer's hip. Leer supports himself on his arm, bleeds quickly, collapses. What use is it that he was a good mathematician?

Summer of 1918 — the most bloody and terrible. Never has life seemed so desirable: red poppies, warm evenings, stars and flowing waters, dreams and long sleep. O Life, life, life! Never was the return to the front harder. Wild rumours of armistice torment us with hope. Why do they not make an end?

On a late summer day, bringing food, Kat is hit in the shin. The bone seems smashed. I carry him on my back to the dressing station. We rest, smoke, talk about the goose we stole, the barrage he brought me through as a young recruit. I write down his address. "Perhaps we could do something together later on, Kat." He is my friend, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the poor thin moustache, with whom I have shared these years. I think of shooting myself in the foot to stay with him.

Suddenly Kat turns green and yellow. I jump up and run with him, staggering, to the station. I drop to my knees but smile — Kat is saved.

"You might have spared yourself that," says an orderly. "He is stone dead."

On the way, without my noticing, a tiny stray splinter caught him in the head. One little hole. It sufficed.

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I turn in a circle. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

Chapter XII

It is autumn. There are not many of the old hands left. I am the last of the seven fellows from our class. Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it proves an illusion again, they will break; hope is too high to be taken away. If there is not peace, there will be revolution.

I have fourteen days rest because I have swallowed gas. In a little garden I sit the whole day long in the sun. The armistice is coming, I believe it now. Then we will go home.

Here my thoughts stop. All that meets me, all that floods over me are feelings — greed of life, love of home, yearning of the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no aims.

Had we returned in 1916, out of the suffering and strength of our experiences we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more. Men will not understand us. The generation before us will return to its occupations and forget the war. The generation after us will push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves. The years will pass and in the end we shall fall into ruin.

But perhaps all this is mere melancholy that will fly away when I stand beneath the poplars and listen to the rustling of their leaves. It cannot be that it has gone — the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and books, the whispers of women. It cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.

Here the trees show gay and golden, the berries of the rowan stand red among the leaves, country roads run white out to the skyline, and the canteens hum with rumours of peace.

I stand up.

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they bring me nothing more, they can bring me nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.

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.

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.