All Quiet on the Western Front quotes

Last night we moved back and settled down to get a good sleep for once:

Katczinsky is right when he says it would not be such a bad war if only one could get a little more sleep.

In the line we have had next to none, and fourteen days is a long time at one stretch.

We feel ourselves for the time being better off than in any palatial white-tiled “convenience.”

There it can only be hygienic; here it is beautiful.

These are wonderfully carefree hours. Over us is the blue sky. On the horizon float the bright yellow, sunlit observation-balloons, and the many little white clouds of the antiaircraft shells. Often they rise in a sheaf as they follow after an airman.

Kantorek had been our schoolmaster, a stern little man in a grey tailcoat, with a face like a shrew mouse. He was about the same size as Corporal Himmelstoss, the “terror of Klosterberg.”

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.

They are so much more energetic and uncompromising than the big fellows. I have always taken good care to keep out of sections with small company commanders. They are mostly confounded little martinets.

I can see him now, as he used to glare at us through his spectacles and say in a moving voice: “Won’t you join up, Comrades?”

These teachers always carry their feelings ready in their waistcoat pockets, and trot them out by the hour.

But we didn’t think of that then.

We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Before going over to see Kemmerich we pack up his things: he will need them on the way back.

While they continued to write and talk, 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.

But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards—they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action;

Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old.

But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.

Many an evening I have worked over them—we all did something of the kind—but that has become so unreal to me I cannot comprehend it any more.

Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand.

We often try to look back on it and to find an explanation, but never quite succeed. For us young men of twenty everything is extraordinarily vague, for Kropp, Müller, Leer, and for me, for all of us whom Kantorek calls the “Iron Youth.”

The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be.

We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land.

All the same, we are not often sad.

… conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants—salutes, springing to attention, parade-marches, presenting arms, right wheel, left wheel, clicking the heels, insults, and a thousand pettifogging details.

We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies.

But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.

But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show.

Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.

By threes and fours our class was scattered over the platoons amongst Frisian fishermen, peasants, and labourers with whom we soon made friends. Kropp, Müller, Kemmerich, and I went to No. 9 platoon under Corporal Himmelstoss.

We were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also an ideal and almost romantic character. We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school.

We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer.

At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill.

It is a strange moment when we stand naked; then we become civilians, and almost feel ourselves to be so. When bathing Franz Kemmerich looked as slight and frail as a child. There he lies now—but why?

The whole world ought to pass by this bed and say: “That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn’t want to die. Let him not die!”

My thoughts become confused. This atmosphere of carbolic and gangrene clogs the lungs, it is a thick gruel, it suffocates.

The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply.

The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.

Müller stands in front of the hut waiting for me. I give him the boots. We go in and he tries them on. They fit well.

There is a smell of tar, of summer, and of sweaty feet. Kat sits beside me. He likes to talk. Today we have done an hour’s saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can’t get it out of his head.

“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well,” he says.

Kropp stalks up, with his breeches rolled up and his feet bare. He lays out his washed socks to dry on the grass. Kat turns his eyes to heaven, lets off a mighty fart, and says meditatively:

Kropp stalks up, with his breeches rolled up and his feet bare. He lays out his washed socks to dry on the grass. Kat turns his eyes to heaven, lets off a mighty fart, and says meditatively: “

Every little bean must be heard as well as seen.

”

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.

The subject is dropped. Then the conversation turns to drill.

And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same.

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.

The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. The mischief is merely that each one has much too much power. A noncom can torment a private, a lieutenant a noncom, a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad.

“

Revenge is black-pudding.

”

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth.

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 shellfire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother;

It’s unendurable.

It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.

We are pale. Detering stands up. “God! For God’s sake! Shoot them.”

Detering walks up and down cursing: “Like to know what harm they’ve done.” He returns to it once again. His voice is agitated, it sounds almost dignified as he says: “

I tell you it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war.

”

The two fellows take them at the right moment on their poles and lift them over behind us. We hear their call “Mind—wire—,” dip the knee in a half-sleep and straighten up again.

Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain.

It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s grave; it falls in our hearts.

Albert expresses it: “

The war has ruined us for everything.

”

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

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 with one another than even lovers have.

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death.

We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room:

“How does it taste, Kat?”

We are brothers and press on one another the choicest pieces.

Afterwards I smoke a cigarette and Kat a cigar. There is still a lot left.

If it were simply a mistake in aim no one would say anything, but the truth is that the barrels are worn out. The shots are often so uncertain that they land within our own lines. Tonight two of our men were wounded by them.

The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen.

We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us, Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bombproof dugout 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 must look out for our bread. The rats have become much more numerous lately because the trenches are no longer in good condition. Detering says it is a sure sign of a coming bombardment.

After this affair the sticky, close atmosphere works more than ever on our nerves.

We sit as if in our graves waiting only to be closed in.

Suddenly it howls and flashes terrifically, the dugout cracks in all its joints under a direct hit, fortunately only a light one that the concrete blocks are able to withstand. It rings metallically, the walls reel, rifles, helmets, earth, mud, and dust fly everywhere.

this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance.

If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb at him.

The forward trenches have been abandoned. Are they still trenches? They are blown to pieces, annihilated—there are only broken bits of trenches, holes linked by cracks, nests of craters, that is all. But the enemy’s casualties increase. They did not count on so much resistance.

We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man.

We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.

A young Frenchman lags behind, he is overtaken, he puts up his hands, in one he still holds his revolver—does he mean to shoot or to give himself up?—a blow from a spade cleaves through his face.

It is a good thing we have something decent to eat at last; we still have a use for all our strength.

Enough to eat is just as valuable as a good dugout; it can save our lives; that is the reason we are so greedy for it.

Tjaden has captured two water-bottles full of cognac. We pass them round.

… charges and attacks made by the poor brave wretches, who are so terrified that they dare not cry out loudly, but with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs only whimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them.

Their sharp, downy, dead faces have the awful expressionlessness of dead children.

It brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over, and run and fall.

It brings a lump into the throat to see how they go over, and run and fall.

A man would like to spank them, they are so stupid, and to take them by the arm and lead them away from here where they have no business to be.

They wear grey coats and trousers and boots, but for most of them the uniform is far too big, it hangs on their limbs, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; no uniform was ever made to these childish measurements.

good food and rest. That’s not much when one comes to think of it. A few years ago we would have despised ourselves terribly. But now we are almost happy. It is all a matter of habit—even the front-line.

Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly.

Yesterday we were under fire, today we act the fool and go foraging through the countryside, tomorrow we go up to the trenches again. We forget nothing really.

But we do not forget. It’s all rot that they put in the war news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line.

We don’t act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.

Even so we cannot hold out much longer; our humour becomes more bitter every month.

if I were going up to the front, then she would have called me again “pauvre garçon”; but merely going on leave—she does not want to hear about that, that is not nearly so interesting. May she go to the devil with her chattering talk.

A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.

Next morning, after I have been deloused, I go to the rail head. Albert and Kat come with me. At the halt we learn that it will be a couple of hours yet before the train leaves.

The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame.

These names mark the boundaries of my youth.

Smooth meadows, fields, farmyards; a solitary team moves against the skyline along the road that runs parallel to the horizon—a barrier, before which peasants stand waiting, girls waving, children playing on the embankment, roads, leading into the country, smooth roads without artillery.

On hands and knees, carrying his gun in regulation fashion, Kantorek shoves his absurd figure over the sand immediately in front of us.

He is breathing hard, and his panting is music.

Mittelstaedt encourages Kantorek the territorial with quotations from Kantorek the schoolmaster. “Territorial Kantorek, we have the good fortune to live in a great age, we must brace ourselves and triumph over hardship.”

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.

I ought never to have come on leave.

I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transparent shadow, that I almost fail to hear the commands.

It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.

And here I have not much companionship, and do not even desire it. We are too little acquainted with one another to do more than joke a bit and play poker or nap in the evenings.

It is distressing to watch them take their afternoon meal thus; one would like to crack them over their thick pates. They rarely give anything away.

How little we understand one another.

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like sick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it; their fingers hook round the mesh.

I am often on guard over the Russians.

In the darkness one sees their forms move like sick storks, like great birds.

They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it; their fingers hook round the mesh. Often many stand side by side, and breathe the wind that comes down from the moors and the forest.

Their life is obscure and guiltless;—if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what their burdens are, then my emotion would have an object and 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 has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.

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 has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.

At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world’s condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim.

But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostles’ beards.

Any noncommissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us.

And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.

I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow to me and then light the cigarettes. Now red points glow in every face.

They comfort me; it looks as though there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind them are rooms full of peace.

The days go by. On a foggy morning another of the Russians is buried; almost every day one of them dies. I am on guard during the burial.

“I think it is more of a kind of fever,” says Albert. “

No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is.

We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing—and yet half the world is in it all the same.”

At once a new warmth flows through me. These voices, these quiet words, these footsteps in the trench behind me recall me at a bound from the terrible loneliness and fear of death by which I had been almost destroyed.

They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;—I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way;

This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing. Kat and Kropp and Müller have experienced it already, when they have hit someone; it happens to many, in hand-to-hand fighting especially—

But every gasp lays my heart bare.

This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.

But every gasp lays my heart bare.

This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.

I would give much if he would but stay alive. It is hard to lie here and to have to see and hear him.

The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and to say to him: “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.

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;

The pocketbook is easy to find. But I hesitate to open it. In it is the book with his name. So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture.

But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again.

It has the power to recall this forever, it will always come back and stand before me.

A minute later a sister appears.

In her black and white dress she looks like a beautiful teacosy.

“Shut the door, will you, sister?” says someone.

On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines.

Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit.

Two fellows die of tetanus. Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live—stubbornly. Many of the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a gallows;

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.

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.

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.

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.

I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.

And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me.

What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account?

What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards?

What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death.

What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

We count the weeks no more. It was winter when I came up, and when the shells exploded the frozen clods of earth were just as dangerous as the fragments. Now the trees are green again. Our life alternates between billets and the front.

We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery.

The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;—when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead.

Fields of craters within and without.

Everyone is so, not only ourselves here—the things that existed before are no longer valid, and one practically knows them no more. Distinctions, breeding, education are changed, are almost blotted out and hardly recognizable any longer.

Sometimes they give an advantage for profiting by a situation;—but they also bring consequences along with them, in that they arouse prejudices which have to be overcome.

It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp.

To rediscover the old distinctions, the metal itself must be tested. First we are soldiers and afterwards, in a strange and shamefaced fashion, individual men as well.

but whereas the latter can be so always, because they are so truly, and at best may develop further by exertion of their spiritual forces, with us it is the reverse;—our inner forces are not exerted toward regeneration, but toward degeneration.

The Bushmen are primitive and naturally so, but we are primitive in an artificial sense, and by virtue of the utmost effort.

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness.

The Bushmen are primitive and naturally so, but we are primitive in an artificial sense, and by virtue of the utmost effort.

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness.

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness.

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.

Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.

Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night.

Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.

Every day and every hour, every shell and every death cuts into this thin support, and the years waste it rapidly. I see how it is already gradually breaking down around me.

Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.

Every day and every hour, every shell and every death cuts into this thin support, and the years waste it rapidly.

I see how it is already gradually breaking down around me.

Our artillery is fired out, it has too few shells and the barrels are so worn that they shoot uncertainly, and scatter so widely as even to fall on ourselves. We have too few horses.

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.

They understand nothing about warfare, they simply go on and let themselves be shot down. A single flyer routed two companies of them for a joke, just as they came fresh from the train—before they had ever heard of such a thing as cover.

“Germany ought to be empty soon,” says Kat.

We have given up hope that some day an end may come. We never think so far. A man can stop a bullet and be killed; he can get wounded, and then the hospital is his next stop.