BY ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

All Quiet on the Western Front
The Road Back
Three Comrades
Flotsam
Arch of Triumph
Spark of Life
A Time to Love and a Time to Die
The Black Obelisk
Heaven Has No Favorites
The Night in Lisbon

Shadows in Paradise
ALL QUIET ONTHE

WESTERN
FRONT
 
ALL QUIET. ON THE

WESTERN
FRONT

 

 

A Nowel

Erich Maria Remarque

Translated from the German by
A. W. Wheen

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS

NEW YORK
All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
“Im Westen Nichts Neues,” copyright © 1928 by Ullstein A.G
Copyright renewed 1956 by Erich Maria Remarque
Copyright © 1929, 1930 by Little, Brown and Company
Copyright renewed 1957, 1958 by Erich Maria Remarque
Reading group guide copyright © 2013 by Random House, LLC.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade
Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are trademarks of Random House, LLC.

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ISBN 978-0-449-91149-5
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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34 36 38 39 37 35

Book design by Christopher M. Zucker
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession,
and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adven-
ture to those who stand face to face with it. It will try
simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though
they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
 
ALL QUIET'ON THE

WESTERN
FRONT
 
One

 

WE ARE AT REST five miles behind the front. Yesterday we
were relieved, and now our bellies are full of beef and haricot
beans. We are satisfied and at peace. Each man has another
mess-tin full for the evening; and, what is more, there is a
double ration of sausage and bread. That puts a man in fine
trim. We have not had such luck as this for a long time. The
cook with his carroty head is begging us to eat; he beckons
with his ladle to every one that passes, and spoons him out a
great dollop. He does not see how he can empty his stew-pot
in time for coffee. Tjaden and Miiller have produced two
washbasins and had them filled up to the brim as a reserve. In
Tjaden this is voracity, in Miller it is foresight. Where Tjaden
puts it all is a mystery, for he is and always will be as thin as a
rake.

What's more important still is the issue of a double ration
of smokes. Ten cigars, twenty cigarettes, and two quids of
chew per man; now that is decent. I have exchanged my chew-
ing tobacco with Katczinsky for his cigarettes, which means I
have forty altogether. That's enough for a day.
4 Erich Maria Remarque

It is true we have no right to this windfall. The Prussian is
not so generous. We have only a miscalculation to thank for it.

Fourteen days ago we had to go up and relieve the front
line. It was fairly quiet on our sector, so the quartermaster
who remained in the rear had requisitioned the usual quantity
of rations and provided for the full company of one hundred
and fifty men. But on the last day an astonishing number of
English heavies opened up on us with high-explosive, drum-
ming ceaselessly on our position, so that we suffered severely
and came back only eighty strong.

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.

It was noon before the first of us crawled out of our quar-
ters. Half an hour later every man had his mess-tin and we
gathered at the cook-house, which smelt greasy and nourish-
ing. At the head of the queue of course were the hungriest—
little Albert Kropp, the clearest thinker among us and
therefore only a lance-corporal; Miiller, who still carries his
school textbooks with him, dreams of examinations, and
during a bombardment mutters propositions in physics;
Leer, who wears a full beard and has a preference for the girls
from officers’ brothels. He swears that they are obliged by an
army order to wear silk chemises and to bathe before enter-
taining guests of the rank of captain and upwards. And as
the fourth, myself, Paul Baumer. All four are nineteen years
of age, and all four joined up from the same class as volun-
teers for the war.

Close behind us were our friends: Tjaden, a skinny lock-
All Quiet on the Western Front 5

smith of our own age, the biggest eater of the company. He
sits down to eat as thin as a grasshopper and gets up as big as
a bug in the family way; Haie Westhus, of the same age, a
peat-digger, who can easily hold a ration-loaf in his hand and
say: Guess what I've got in my fist; then Detering, a peasant,
who thinks of nothing but his farm-yard and his wife; and fi-
nally Stanislaus Katczinsky, the leader of our group, shrewd,
cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the
soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty
weather, good food, and soft jobs.

Our gang formed the head of the queue before the cook-
house. We were growing impatient, for the cook paid no at-
tention to us.

Finally Katczinsky called to him: “Say, Heinrich, open up
the soup-kitchen. Anyone can see the beans are done.”

He shook his head sleepily: “You must all be there first.”
Tjaden grinned: “We are all here.”

The sergeant-cook still took no notice. “That may do for
you,” he said. “But where are the others?”

“They won't be fed by you to-day. They're either in the
dressing-station or pushing up daisies.”

The cook was quite disconcerted as the facts dawned on
him. He was staggered. “And I have cooked for one hundred

”»

and fifty men

 

Kropp poked him in the ribs. “Then for once we'll have
enough. Come on, begin!”

Suddenly a vision came over Tjaden. His sharp, mousy fea-
tures began to shine, his eyes grew small with cunning, his
jaws twitched, and he whispered hoarsely: “Man! then you've
got bread for one hundred and fifty men too, eh?”

The sergeant-cook nodded absent-minded, and bewildered.
6 Erich Maria Remarque

Tjaden seized him by the tunic. “And sausage?”

Ginger nodded again.

Tjaden’s chaps quivered. “Tobacco too?”

“Yes, everything.”

Tjaden beamed: “What a bean-feast! That's all for us! Each
man gets—wait a bit—yes, practically two issues.”

Then Ginger stirred himself and said: “That won't do.”

We got excited and began to crowd around.

“Why won't that do, you old carrot?” demanded Katczin-
sky.

“Eighty men can’t have what is meant for a hundred and
fifty.”

“We'll soon show you,” growled Miiller.

“I don’t care about the stew, but I can only issue rations for
eighty men,” persisted Ginger.

Katczinsky got angry. “You might be generous for once.
You haven't drawn food for eighty men. You've drawn it for
the Second Company. Good. Let’s have it then. We are the
Second Company.”

We began to jostle the fellow. No one felt kindly toward
him, for it was his fault that the food often came up to us in
the line too late and cold. Under shellfire he wouldn't bring
his kitchen up near enough, so that our soup-carriers had to go
much farther than those of the other companies. Now Bulcke
of the First Company is a much better fellow. He is as fat as a
hamster in winter, but he trundles his pots when it comes to
that right up to the very front-line.

We were in just the right mood, and there would certainly
have been a dust-up if our company commander had not ap-
peared. He informed himself of the dispute, and only re-
marked: “Yes, we did have heavy losses yesterday.”
All Quiet on the Western Front 7

He glanced into the dixie. “The beans look good.”

Ginger nodded. “Cooked with meat and fat.”

The lieutenant looked at us. He knew what we were think-
ing. And he knew many other things too, because he came to
the company as a non-com. and was promoted from the ranks.
He lifted the lid from the dixie again and sniffed. Then pass-
ing on he said: “Bring me a plate full. Serve out all the rations.
We can do with them.”

Ginger looked sheepish as Tjaden danced round him.

It doesn’t cost you anything! Anyone would think the quar-
termaster’s store belonged to him! And now get on with you,
you old blubber-sticker, and don’t you miscount either.”

“You be hanged!” spat out Ginger. When things get be-
yond him he throws up the sponge altogether; he just goes to
pieces. And as if to show that all things were equal to him, of
his own free will he issued in addition half a pound of syn-
thetic honey to each man.

To-day is wonderfully good. The mail has come, and almost
every man has a few letters and papers. We stroll over to the
meadow behind the billets. Kropp has the round lid of a mar-
garine tub under his arm.

On the right side of the meadow a large common latrine
has been built, a roofed and durable construction. But that is
for recruits who as yet have not learned how to make the most
of whatever comes their way. We want something better. Scat-
tered about everywhere there are separate, individual boxes for
the same purpose. They are square, neat boxes with wooden
sides all round, and have unimpeachably satisfactory seats. On
the sides are hand grips enabling one to shift them about.
8 Erich Maria Remarque

We move three together in a ring and sit down comfort-
ably. And it will be two hours before we get up again.

I well remember how embarrassed we were as recruits in
barracks when we had to use the general latrine. There were
no doors and twenty men sat side by side as in a railway car-
riage, so that they could be reviewed all at one glance, for
soldiers must always be under supervision.

Since then we have learned better than to be shy about such
trifling immodesties. In time things far worse than that came
easy to us.

Here in the open air though, the business is entirely a plea-
sure. I no longer understand why we should always have shied
at these things before. They are, in fact, just as natural as eat-
ing and drinking. We might perhaps have paid no particular
attention to them had they not figured so large in our experi-
ence, nor been such novelties to our minds—to the old hands
they had long been a mere matter of course.

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his
stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is de-
rived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to
expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indigna-
tion. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so
clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked
when we go home, but here it is the universal language.

Enforced publicity has in our eyes restored the character of
complete innocence to all these things. More than that, they
are so much a matter of course that their comfortable perfor-
mance is fully as much enjoyed as the playing of a safe top
running flush. Not for nothing was the word “latrine-rumour”
invented; these places are the regimental gossip-shop and

common-rooms.
All Quiet on the Western Front 9

We feel ourselves for the time being better off than in any
palatial white-tiled “convenience.” There it can only be hy-
gienic; bere it is beautiful.

These are wonderfully care-free 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 anti-aircraft
shells. Often they rise in a sheaf as they follow after an airman.
We hear the muffled rumble of the front only as very distant
thunder, bumblebees droning by quite drown it. Around us
stretches the flowery meadow. The grasses sway their tall
spears; the white butterflies flutter around and float on the soft
warm wind of the late summer. We read letters and newspa-
pers and smoke. We take off our caps and lay them down be-
side us. The wind plays with our hair; it plays with our words
and thoughts. The three boxes stand in the midst of the glow-
ing, red field-poppies.

We set the lid of the margarine tub on our knees and so
have a good table for a game of skat. Kropp has the cards with
him. After every misére ouverte we have a round of nap. One
could sit like this for ever.

The notes of an accordion float across from the billets. Often
we lay aside the cards and look about us. One of us will say:
“Well, boys. . ..” Or “It was a near thing that time. . . .” And
for a moment we fall silent. There is in each of us a feeling of
constraint. We are all sensible of it; it needs no words to com-
municate it. It might easily have happened that we should not
be sitting here on our boxes to-day; it came damn near to that.
And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good
food, cigarettes and summer breeze.

Kropp asks: “Anyone seen Kemmerich lately?”

3.599

“He’s up at St. Joseph's,” I tell him.
10 Erich Maria Remarque

Miiller explains that he has a flesh wound in his thigh; a
good blighty.

We decide to go and see him this afternoon.

Kropp pulls out a letter. “Kantorek sends you all his best
wishes.”

We laugh. Miiller throws his cigarette away and says: “I

wish he was here.”

Kantorek had been our schoolmaster, a stern little man in a
grey tail-coat, with a face like a shrew mouse. He was about
the same size as Corporal Himmelstoss, the “terror of Kloster-
berg.” It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so
often brought on by small men. They are so much more ener-
getic 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.

During drill-time Kantorek gave us long lectures until the
whole of our class went, under his shepherding, to the District
Commandant and volunteered. 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.

There was, indeed, one of us who hesitated and did not
want to fall into line. That was Joseph Behm, a plump, homely
fellow. But he did allow himself to be persuaded, otherwise he
would have been ostracized. And perhaps more of us thought
as he did, but no one could very well stand out, because at that
time even one’s parents were ready with the word “coward”;
no one had the vaguest idea what we were in for. The wisest
All Quiet on the Western Front II

were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to
be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should
have been able to see more clearly what the consequences
would be, were beside themselves with joy.

Katczinsky said that was a result of their upbringing. It
made them stupid. And what Kat said, he had thought about.

Strange to say, Behm was one of the first to fall. He got hit
in the eye during an attack, and we left him lying for dead.
We couldn’t bring him with us, because we had to come back
helter-skelter. In the afternoon suddenly we heard him call,
and saw him crawling about in No Man’s Land. He had only
been knocked unconscious. Because he could not see, and was
mad with pain, he failed to keep under cover, and so was shot
down before anyone could go and fetch him in.

Naturally we couldn’t blame Kantorek for this. Where
would the world be if one brought every man to book? There
were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced
that they were acting for the best—in a way that cost them
nothing.

And that is why they let us down so badly.

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators
and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of
duty, of culture, of progress—to the future. We often made
fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we
trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented,
was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more
humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this
belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to
be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and
in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake,
and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in
pieces.
12 Erich Maria Remarque

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 ex-
pressions. 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.

In the dressing station there is great activity: it reeks as ever
of carbolic, pus, and sweat. We are accustomed to a good deal
in the billets, but this makes us feel faint. We ask for Kem-
merich. He lies in a large room and receives us with feeble
expressions of joy and helpless agitation. While he was uncon-
scious someone had stolen his watch.

Miiller shakes his head: “I always told you that nobody
should carry as good a watch as that.”

Miiller is rather crude and tactless, otherwise he would hold
his tongue, for anybody can see that Kemmerich will never
come out of this place again. Whether he finds his watch or
not will make no difference, at the most one will only be able
to send it to his people.

“How goes it, Franz?” asks Kropp.

Kemmerich'’s head sinks.

“Not so bad . . . but I have such a damned pain in my foot.”

We look at his bed covering. His leg lies under a wire bas-
ket. The bed covering arches over it. I kick Miiller on the shin,
All Quiet on the Western Front 13

for he is just about to tell Kemmerich what the orderlies told
us outside: that Kemmerich has lost his foot. The leg is ampu-
tated. He looks ghastly, yellow and wan. In his face there are
already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen
them now hundreds of times. They are not so much lines as
marks. Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has already
pressed out the boundaries of the body. Death is working
through from within. It already has command in the eyes.
Here lies our comrade, Kemmerich, who a little while ago was
roasting horse flesh with us and squatting in the shell-holes.
He it is still and yet it is not he any longer. His features have
become uncertain and faint, like a photographic plate from
which two pictures have been taken. Even his voice sounds
like ashes.

I think of the time when he went away. His mother, a good
plump matron, brought him to the station. She wept continu-
ally, her face was bloated and swollen. Kemmerich felt embar-
rassed, for she was the least composed of all; she simply
dissolved into fat and water. Then she caught sight of me and
took hold of my arm again and again, and implored me to
look after Franz out there. Indeed he did have a face like a
child, and such frail bones that after four weeks’ pack-carrying
he already had flat feet. But how can a man look after anyone
in the field!

“Now you will soon be going home,” says Kropp. “You
would have had to wait at least three or four months for your
leave.”

Kemmerich nods. I cannot bear to look at his hands, they
are like wax. Under the nails is the dirt of the trenches, it
shows through blue-black like poison. It strikes me that these
nails will continue to grow like lean fantastic cellar-plants
long after Kemmerich breathes no more. I see the picture be-
14 Erich Maria Remarque

fore me. They twist themselves into corkscrews and grow and
grow, and with them the hair on the decaying skull, just like

 

grass in a good soil, just like grass, how can it be possible

Miiller leans over. “We have brought your things, Franz.”

Kemmerich signs with his hands. “Put them under the
bed.”

Miiller does so. Kemmerich starts on again about the watch.
How can one calm him without making him suspicious?

Miiller reappears with a pair of airman’s boots. They are fine
English boots of soft, yellow leather which reach to the knees
and lace up all the way—they are things to be coveted.

Miiller is delighted at the sight of them. He matches their
soles against his own clumsy boots and says: “Will you be tak-
ing them with you then, Franz?”

We all three have the same thought; even if he should get
better, he would be able to use only one—they are no use to
him. But as things are now it is a pity that they should stay
here; the orderlies will of course grab them as soon as he is
dead.

“Won't you leave them with us?” Miiller repeats.

Kemmerich doesn’t want to. They are his most prized pos-
sessions.

’

“Well, we could exchange,” suggests Miiller again. “Out
here one can make some use of them.” Still Kemmerich is not
to be moved.

I tread on Miiller’s foot; reluctantly he puts the fine boots
back again under the bed.

We talk a little more and then take our leave.

“Cheerio, Franz.”

I promise him to come back in the morning. Miiller talks
of doing so, too. He is thinking of the lace-up boots and means

to be on the spot.
All Quiet on the Western Front Is

Kemmerich groans. He is feverish. We get hold of an or-
derly outside and ask him to give Kemmerich a dose of mor-
phia.

He refuses. “If we were to give morphia to everyone we

»

 

would have to have tubs full
“You only attend to officers properly,” says Kropp viciously.
I hastily intervene and give him a cigarette. He takes it.
“Are you usually allowed to give it, then?” I ask him.
He is annoyed. “If you don’t think so, then why do you
ask?”
I press a few more cigarettes into his hand. “Do us the
favour r
“Well, all right,” he says.

Kropp goes in with him. He doesn’t trust him and wants to

 

see. We wait outside.

Miiller returns to the subject of the boots. “They would fit
me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you
think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in

”»

the night, we know where the boots

 

?” he asks.
“Done for,” said Miiller emphatically.
We go back to the huts. I think of the letter that I must

Kropp returns. “Do you think

 

write to-morrow to Kemmerich’s mother. I am freezing. I
could do with a tot of rum. Miiller pulls up some grass and
chews it. Suddenly little Kropp throws his cigarette away,
stamps on it savagely, and looking around him with a broken
and distracted face, stammers “Damned shit, the damned
shit!”

We walk on for a long time. Kropp has calmed himself; we
understand, he saw red; out there every man gets like that
sometime.

“What has Kantorek written to you?” Miiller asks him.
16 Erich Maria Remarque

He laughs. “We are the Iron Youth.”

We all three smile bitterly, Kropp rails: he is glad that he
can speak.

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.
Two

IT IS STRANGE to think that at home in the drawer of my
writing table there lies the beginning of a play called “Saul”
and a bundle of poems. Many an evening I have worked over
them—we all did something of the kind—but that has be-
come 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,
Miiller, Leer, and for me, for all of us whom Kantorek calls the
“Iron Youth.” All the older men are linked up with their pre-
vious life. They have wives, children, occupations, and inter-
ests, they have a background which is so strong that the war
cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have
only our parents, and some, perhaps, a girl—that is not much,
for at our age the influence of parents is at its weakest and girls
have not yet got a hold over us. Besides this there was little
else—some enthusiasm, a few hobbies, and our school. Be-
18 Erich Maria Remarque

yond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing re-
mains.

Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of
life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root.
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 melan-
choly way we have become a waste land. All the same, we

are not often sad.

Though Miiller would be delighted to have Kemmerich’s
boots, he is really quite as sympathetic as another who could
not bear to think of such a thing for grief. He merely sees
things clearly. Were Kemmerich able to make any use of the
boots, then Miiller would rather go bare-foot over barbed wire
than scheme how to get hold of them. But as it is the boots are
quite inappropriate to Kemmerich’s circumstances, whereas
Miiller can make good use of them. Kemmerich will die; it is
immaterial who gets them. Why, then, should Miiller not
succeed to them? He has more right than a hospital orderly.
When Kemmerich is dead it will be too late. Therefore Miiller
is already on the watch.

We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they
are artificial. Only the facts are real and important for us. And

good boots are scarce.

Once it was different. When we went to the district comman-
dant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of
whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the
All Quiet on the Western Front 19

barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts
of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a
character to furnish any scheme of life. 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 influ-
enced 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.
We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they
have done everything to knock that out of us. After three
weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided
postman should have more authority over us than had for-
merly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of cul-
ture from Plato to Goethe. With our young, awakened eyes we
saw that the classical 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 thou-
sand 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 our-
selves 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
20 Erich Maria Remarque

whom we soon made friends. Kropp, Miiller, Kemmerich, and
I went to No. 9 platoon under Corporal Himmelstoss.

He had the reputation of being the strictest disciplinarian
in the camp, and was proud of it. He was a small undersized
fellow with a foxy, waxed moustache, who had seen twelve
years’ service and was in civil life a postman. He had a special
dislike of Kropp, Tjaden, Westhus, and me, because he sensed
a quiet defiance.

I have remade his bed fourteen times in one morning. Each
time he had some fault to find and pulled it to pieces. I have
kneaded a pair of prehistoric boots that were as hard as iron for
twenty hours—with intervals of course—until they became as
soft as butter and not even Himmelstoss could find anything
more to do to them; under his orders I have scrubbed out the
Corporals’ Mess with a tooth-brush. Kropp and I were given
the job of clearing the barrack-square of snow with a hand-
broom and a dust-pan, and we would have gone on till we
were frozen had not a lieutenant accidentally appeared who
sent us off, and hauled Himmelstoss over the coals. But the
only result of this was to make Himmelstoss hate us more. For
six weeks consecutively I did guard every Sunday and was hut-
orderly for the same length of time. With a full pack and rifle
I have had to practise on a wet, soft, newly-ploughed field the
“Prepare to advance, advance!” and the “Lie down!” until I
was one lump of mud and finally collapsed. Four hours later I
had to report to Himmelstoss with my clothes scrubbed clean,
my hands chafed and bleeding. Together with Kropp, West-
hus, and Tjaden I have stood at attention in a hard frost with-
out gloves for a quarter of an hour at a stretch, while
Himmelstoss watched for the slightest movement of our bare
fingers on the steel barrel of the rifle. I have run eight times
from the top floor of the barracks down to the courtyard in my
All Quiet on the Western Front 21

shirt at two o'clock in the morning because my drawers pro-
jected three inches beyond the edge of the stool on which one
had to stack all one’s things. Alongside me ran the corporal,
Himmelstoss, and trod on my bare toes. At bayonet-practice I
had constantly to fight with Himmelstoss, I with a heavy iron
weapon, whilst he had a handy wooden one with which he eas-
ily struck my arms till they were black and blue. Once, in-
deed, I became so infuriated that I ran at him blindly and gave
him a mighty jab in the stomach and knocked him down.
When he reported me the company commander laughed at
him and told him he ought to keep his eyes open; he under-
stood Himmelstoss, and apparently was not displeased at his
discomfiture. I became a past master on the parallel bars and
excelled at physical jerks;—we have trembled at the mere
sound of his voice, but his runaway post-horse never got the
better of us.

One Sunday as Kropp and I were lugging a latrine-bucket
on a pole across the barrack-yard, Himmelstoss came by, all
polished up and spry for going out. He planted himself in
front of us and asked how we liked the job. In spite of our-
selves we tripped and emptied the bucket over his legs. He
raved, but the limit had been reached.

“That means clink,” he yelled.

But Kropp had had enough. “There'll be an inquiry first,”
he said, “and then we’ll unload.”

“Mind how you speak to a non-commissioned officer!”
bawled Himmelstoss. “Have you lost your senses? You wait
till you're spoken to. What will you do, anyway?”

“Show you up, Corporal,” said Kropp, his thumbs in line
with the seams of his trousers.

Himmelstoss saw that we meant it and went off without
saying a word. But before he disappeared he growled: “You'll
22 Erich Maria Remarque

drink this!”—but that was the end of his authority. He tried it
on once more in the ploughed field with his “Prepare to ad-
vance, advance” and “Lie down.” We obeyed each order, since
an order’s an order and has to be obeyed. But we did it so
slowly that Himmelstoss became desperate. Carefully we went
down on our knees, then on our hands, and so on; in the mean-
time, quite infuriated, he had given another command. But
before we had even begun to sweat he was hoarse. After that he
left us in peace. He did indeed always refer to us as swine, but
there was, nevertheless, a certain respect in his tone.

There were many other staff corporals, the majority of
whom were more decent. But above all each of them wanted
to keep his good job there as long as possible, and this he
could do only by being strict with the recruits.

So we were put through every conceivable refinement of
parade-ground soldiering till we often howled with rage. Many
of us became ill through it; Wolf actually died of inflammation
of the lung. But we would have felt ridiculous had we hauled
down our colours. We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious,
tough—and that was good; for these attributes were just what
we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period
of training most of us would certainly have gone mad. Only
thus were we prepared for what awaited us. We did not break
down, but adapted ourselves; our twenty years, which made
many another thing so grievous, helped us in this. But by far
the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong,
practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into
the finest thing that arose out of the war—comradeship.

I sit by Kemmerich’s bed. He is sinking steadily. Around us is
great commotion. A hospital train has arrived and the
All Quiet on the Western Front 23

wounded fit to be moved are being selected. The doctor passes
by Kemmerich’s bed without once looking at him.

“Next time, Franz,” I say.

He raises himself on the pillow with his elbows. “They have
amputated my leg.”

He knows it too then. I nod and answer: “You must be
thankful you've come off with that.”

He is silent.

I resume: “It might have been both legs, Franz. Wegeler
has lost his right arm. That's much worse. Besides, you will be
going home.” He looks at me. “Do you think so?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think so?” he repeats.

“Sure, Franz. Once you've got over the operation.”

He beckons me to bend down. I stoop over him and he
whispers: “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t talk rubbish; Franz, in a couple of days you'll see for
yourself. What is it anyway—an amputated leg? Here they
patch up far worse things than that.”

He lifts one hand. “Look here though, these fingers.”

“That’s the result of the operation. Just eat decently and
you'll soon be well again. Do they look after you properly?”

He points to a dish that is still half full. I get excited.
“Franz, you must eat. Eating is the main thing. That looks
good too.”

He turns away. After a pause he says slowly: “I wanted to
become a head-forester once.”

“So you may still,” I assure him. “There are splendid artifi-
cial limbs now, you'd hardly know there was anything miss-
ing. They are fixed on to the muscles. You can move the fingers
and work and even write with an artificial hand. And besides,

they will always be making new improvements.”
24 Erich Maria Remarque

For a while he lies still. Then he says: “You can take my
lace-up boots with you for Miiller.”

I nod and wonder what to say to encourage him. His lips
have fallen away, his mouth has become larger, his teeth stick
out and look as though they were made of chalk. The flesh
melts, the forehead bulges more prominently, the cheekbones
protrude. The skeleton is working itself through. The eyes are
already sunken in. In a couple of hours it will be over.

He is not the first that I have seen thus; but we grew up
together and that always makes it a bit different. I have copied
his essays. At school he used to wear a brown coat with a belt
and shiny sleeves. He was the only one of us, too, who could
do the giant's turn on the horizontal bar. His hair flew in his
face like silk when he did it. Kantorek was proud of him. But
he couldn’t stand cigarettes. His skin was very white; he had
something of the girl about him.

I glance at my boots. They are big and clumsy, the breeches
are tucked into them, and standing up one looks well-built
and powerful in these great drainpipes. But when we go bath-
ing and strip, suddenly we have slender legs again and slight
shoulders. We are no longer soldiers but little more than boys;
no one would believe that we could carry packs. It is a strange
moment when we stand naked; then we become civilians, and
almost feel ourselves to be so. When bathing Franz Kem-
merich 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.

It grows dark. Kemmerich’s face changes colour, it lifts
from the pillow and is so pale that it gleams. The mouth
All Quiet on the Western Front 25

moves slightly. I draw near to him. He whispers: “If you find

”»

 

my watch, send it home

I do not reply. It is no use any more. No one can console
him. I am wretched with helplessness. This forehead with its
hollow temples, this mouth that now seems all teeth, this
sharp nose! And the fat, weeping woman at home to whom I
must write. If only the letter were sent off already!

Hospital-orderlies go to and fro with bottles and pails. One
of them comes up, casts a glance at Kemmerich and goes away
again. You can see he is waiting, apparently he wants the bed.

I bend over Franz and talk to him as though that could save
him: “Perhaps you will go to the convalescent home at Kloster-
berg, among the villas, Franz. Then you can look out from the
window across the fields to the two trees on the horizon. It is
the loveliest time of the year now, when the corn ripens; at
evening the fields in the sunlight look like mother-of-pearl.
And the lane of poplars by the Klosterbach, where we used to
catch stickle-backs! You can build an aquarium again and
keep fish in it, and you can go without asking anyone, you can
even play the piano if you want to.”

I lean down over his face which lies in the shadow. He still
breathes, lightly. His face is wet, he is crying. What a fine
mess I have made of it with my foolish talk!

“But Franz"—I put my arm round his shoulder and put my
face against his. “Will you sleep now?”

He does not answer. The tears run down his cheeks. I would
like to wipe them away but my handkerchief is too dirty.

An hour passes. I sit tensely and watch his every movement
in case he may perhaps say something. What if he were to
open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head
turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers
and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is
26 Erich Maria Remarque

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, although it was pretty
bad too with Tiedjen, who called for his mother—a big bear
of a fellow who, with wild eyes full of terror, held off the doc-
tor from his bed with a dagger until he collapsed.

Suddenly Kemmerich groans and begins to gurgle.

I jump up, stumble outside and demand: “Where is the
doctor? Where is the doctor?”

As I catch sight of the white apron I seize hold of it: “Come
quick, Franz Kemmerich is dying.”

He frees himself and asks an orderly standing by: “Which
will that be?”

He says: “Bed 26, amputated thigh.”

He sniffs: “How should I know anything about it, I've am-
putated five legs to-day”; he shoves me away, says to the
hospital-orderly “You see to it,” and hurries off to the operat-
ing room.

I tremble with rage as I go along with the orderly. The man
looks at me and says: “One operation after another since five
o'clock this morning. You know, to-day alone there have been
sixteen deaths—yours is the seventeenth. There will probably

 

be twenty altogether

I become faint, all at once I cannot do any more. I won't
revile any more, it is senseless, I could drop down and never
rise up again.

We are by Kemmerich’s bed. He is dead. The face is still
wet from the tears. The eyes are half open and yellow like old
horn buttons. The orderly pokes me in the ribs, “Are you tak-
ing his things with you?” I nod.

He goes on: “We must take him away at once, we want the
bed. Outside they are lying on the floor.”
All Quiet on the Western Front 27

I collect Kemmerich’s things, and untie his identification
disc. The orderly asks about the paybook. I say that it is prob-
ably in the orderly-room, and go. Behind me they are already
hauling Franz on to a waterproof sheet.

Outside the door I am aware of the darkness and the wind
as a deliverance. I breathe as deep as I can, and feel the breeze
in my face, warm and soft as never before. Thoughts of girls,
of flowery meadows, of white clouds suddenly come into my
head. My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker,
I run. Soldiers pass by me, I hear their voices without under-
standing. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into
me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electri-
cally, 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.

Miiller 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.

He roots among his supplies and offers me a fine piece of
saveloy. With it goes hot tea and rum.
Three

 

REINFORCEMENTS HAVE ARRIVED. The vacancies have
been filled and the sacks of straw in the huts are already
booked. Some of them are old hands, but there are twenty-five
men of a later draft from the base. They are about two years
younger than us. Kropp nudges me: “Seen the infants?”

I nod. We stick out our chests, shave in the open, shove our
hands in our pockets, inspect the recruits and feel ourselves
stone-age veterans.

Katczinsky joins us. We stroll past the horse-boxes and go
over to the reinforcements, who are already being issued with
gas masks and coffee.

“Long time since you've had anything decent to eat, eh?”
Kat asks one of the youngsters.

He grimaces. “For breakfast, turnip-bread—lunch, turnip-
stew—supper, turnip-cutlets and turnip-salad.” Kat gives a
knowing whistle.

“Bread made of turnips? You've been in luck, it’s nothing
new for it to be made of sawdust. But what do you say to

haricot beans? Have some?”
All Quiet on the Western Front 29

The youngster turns red: “You can’t kid me.”

Katczinsky merely says: “Fetch your mess-tin.”

We follow curiously. He takes us to a tub beside his straw
sack. Sure enough it is half full of beef and beans. Katczinsky
plants himself in front of it like a general and says:

“Sharp eyes and light fingers! That's what the Prussians
say.”

We are surprised. “Great guts, Kat, how did you come by
that?” I ask him.

“Ginger was glad I took it. I gave him three pieces of
parachute-silk for it. Cold beans taste fine, too.”

Patronizingly he gives the youngster a portion and says:

“Next time you come with your mess-tin have a cigar or a
chew of tobacco in your other hand. Get me?” Then he turns
to us. “You get off scot free, of course.”

We couldn’t do without Katczinsky; he has a sixth sense.
There are such people everywhere but one does not appreciate
it at first. Every company has one or two. Katczinsky is the
smartest I know. By trade he is a cobbler, I believe, but that
hasn’t anything to do with it; he understands all trades. It’s a
good thing to be friends with him, as Kropp and I are, and
Haie Westhus too, more or less. But Haie is rather the execu-
tive arm, operating under Kat's orders when things come to
blows. For that he has his qualifications.

For example, we land at night in some entirely unknown
spot, a sorry hole, that has been eaten out to the very walls.
We are quartered in a small dark factory adapted to the pur-
pose. There are beds in it, or rather bunks—a couple of wooden
beams over which wire netting is stretched.

Wire netting is hard. And there’s nothing to put on it. Our
30 Erich Maria Remarque

waterproof sheets are too thin. We use our blankets to cover
ourselves.

Kat looks at the place and then says to Haie Westhus:
“Come with me.” They go off to explore. Half an hour later
they are back again with arms full of straw. Kat has found a
horse-box with straw in it. Now we might sleep if we weren't
so terribly hungry.

Kropp asks an artilleryman who has been some time in this
neighbourhood: “Is there a canteen anywhere abouts?”

“Is there a what?” he laughs. “There’s nothing to be had
here. You won't find so much as a crust of bread here.”

“Aren’t there any inhabitants here at all then?”

He spits. “Yes, a few. But they hang round the cook-house
and beg.”

“That’s a bad business!—Then we'll have to pull in our
belts and wait till the rations come up in the morning.”

But I see Kat has put on his cap.

“Where to, Kat?” I ask.

“Just to explore the place a bit.” He strolls off. The artil-
leryman grins scornfully. “Go ahead and explore. But don’t
strain yourself in carrying what you find.”

Disappointed we lie down and consider whether we couldn’t
have a go at the iron rations. But it’s too risky; so we try to get
a wink of sleep.

Kropp divides a cigarette and hands me half. Tjaden gives
an account of his national dish—broad-beans and bacon. He
despises it when not flavoured with bog-myrtle, and, “for
God's sake, let it all be cooked together, not the potatoes, the
beans, and the bacon separately.” Someone growls that he will
pound Tjaden into bog-myrtle if he doesn’t shut up. Then all
becomes quiet in the big room—only the candles flickering
All Quiet on the Western Front 31

from the necks of a couple of bottles and the artilleryman spit-
ting every now and then.

We are just dozing off when the door opens and Kat ap-
pears. I think I must be dreaming; he has two loaves of bread
under his arm and a bloodstained sandbag full of horse-flesh in
his hand.

The artilleryman’s pipe drops from his mouth. He feels the
bread. “Real bread, by God, and still hot too?”

Kat gives no explanation. He has the bread, the rest doesn’t
matter. I'm sure that if he were planted down in the middle of
the desert, in half an hour he would have gathered together a
supper of roast meat, dates, and wine.

“Cut some wood,” he says curtly to Haie.

Then he hauls out a frying pan from under his coat, and a
handful of salt as well as a lump of fat from his pocket. He has
thought of everything. Haie makes a fire on the floor. It lights
up the empty room of the factory. We climb out of bed.

The artilleryman hesitates. He wonders whether to praise
Kat and so perhaps gain a little for himself. But Katczinsky
doesn’t even see him, he might as well be thin air. He goes off
cursing.

Kat knows the way to roast horse-flesh so that it’s tender. It
shouldn’t be put straight into the pan, that makes it tough. It
should be boiled, first in a little water. With our knives we
squat round in a circle and fill our bellies.

That is Kat. If for one hour in a year something eatable
were to be had in some one place only, within that hour, as if
moved by a vision, he would put on his cap, go out and walk
directly there, as though following a compass, and find it.

He finds everything—if it is cold, a small stove and wood,
hay and straw, a table and chairs—but above all food. It is
32 Erich Maria Remarque

uncanny; one would think he conjured it out of the air. His
masterpiece was four boxes of lobsters. Admittedly we would
rather have had a good beef steak.

We have settled ourselves on the sunny side of the hut. 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 medi-
tatively: “Every little bean must be heard as well as seen.”

The two begin to argue. At the same time they lay a bottle
of beer on the result of an air-fight that’s going on above us.
Katczinsky won’t budge from the opinion which as an old
Front-hog, he rhymes:

Give ‘em all the same grub and all the same pay
And the war would be over and done in a day.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. 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.
All Quiet on the Western Front 33

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

A picture comes before me. Burning midday in the barrack-
yard. The heat hangs over the square. The barracks are de-
serted. Every thing sleeps. All one hears is the drummers
practising; they have installed themselves somewhere and
practise brokenly, dully, monotonously. What a concord! Mid-
day heat, barrack square, and drummers beating!

The windows of the barracks are empty and dark. From
some of them trousers are hanging to dry. The rooms are cool
and one looks toward them longingly.

O dark, musty platoon huts, with the iron bedsteads, the
chequered bedding, the lockers and the stools! Even you can
become the object of desire; out here you have a faint resem-
blance to home; your rooms, full of the smell of stale food,
sleep, smoke, and clothes.

Katczinsky paints it all in lively colours. What would we
not give to be able to return to it! Farther back than that our
thoughts dare not go.

Those early morning hours of instruction—"“What are
the parts of the 98 rifle?”—the midday hours of physical
training— “Pianist forward! By the right, quick march. Re-
port to the cook-house for potato-peeling.”

We indulge in reminiscences. Kropp laughs suddenly and
says: “Change at Lohne!”

That was our corporal’s favourite game. Lohne is a railway
junction. In order that our fellows going on shouldn't get lost
there, Himmelstoss used to practise the change in the barrack-
room. We had to learn that at Lohne, to reach the branch-line,
we must pass through a subway. The beds represented the
subway and each man stood at attention on the left side of his
bed. Then came the command: “Change at Lohne!” and like
34 Erich Maria Remarque

lightning everyone scrambled under the bed to the opposite
side. We practised this for hours on end.

Meanwhile the German aeroplane has been shot down. Like
a comet it bursts into a streamer of smoke and falls headlong.
Kropp has lost the bottle of beer. Disgruntled he counts out
the money from his wallet.

“Surely Himmelstoss was a very different fellow as a post-
man,” say I, after Albert's disappointment has subsided. “Then
how does it come that he’s such a bully as a drill-sergeant?”

The question revives Kropp, more particularly as he hears
there’s no more beer in the canteen. “It’s not only Himmel-
stoss, there are lots of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a
star they become different men, just as though they'd swal-
lowed concrete.”

“That’s the uniform,” I suggest.

“Roughly speaking it is,” says Kat, and prepares for a long
speech; “but the root of the matter lies somewhere. For in-
stance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards
put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his
nature. 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 non-com. can torment a private, a
lieutenant a non-com., a captain a lieutenant, until he goes
mad. And because they know they can, they all soon acquire
the habit more or less. Take a simple case: we are marching
back from the parade-ground dog-tired. Then comes the
order to sing. We sing spiritlessly, for it is all we can do to
All Quiet on the Western Front 35

trudge along with our rifles. At once the company is turned
about and has to do another hour's drill as punishment. On
the march back the order to sing is given again, and once
more we start. Now what's the use of all that? It’s simply
that the company commander's head has been turned by
having so much power. And nobody blames him. On the
contrary, he is praised for being strict. That, of course, is
only a trifling instance, but it holds also in very different af-
fairs. Now I ask you: Let a man be whatever you like in
peacetime, what occupation is there in which he can behave
like that without getting a crack on the nose? He can only
do that in the army. It goes to the heads of them all, you see.
And the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the
worse it takes him.”

“They say, of course, there must be discipline,” ventures
Kropp meditatively.

“True,” growls Kat, “they always do. And it may be so;
still it oughtn’t to become an abuse. But you try to explain
that to a black-smith or a labourer or a workman, you try to
make that clear to a peasant—and that’s what most of them
are here. All he sees is that he has been put through the mill
and sent to the front, but he knows well enough what he
must do and what not. It’s simply amazing, I tell you, that
the ordinary tommy sticks it all up here in the front-line.
Simply amazing!”

No one protests. Everyone knows that drill ceases only in
the front-line and begins again a few miles behind, with all
the absurdities of saluting and parade. It is an Iron law that
the soldier must be employed under every circumstance.

Here Tjaden comes up with a flushed face. He is so ex-
cited that he stutters. Beaming with satisfaction he stam-
36 Erich Maria Remarque

mers out: “Himmelstoss is on his way. He’s coming to the
front!”

Tjaden has a special grudge against Himmelstoss, because of
the way he educated him in the barracks. Tjaden wets his bed,
he does it at night in his sleep. Himmelstoss maintained that
it was sheer laziness and invented a method worthy of himself
for curing Tjaden.

He hunted up another piss-a-bed, named Kindervater, from
a neighbouring unit, and quartered him with Tjaden. In the
huts there were the usual bunks, one above the other in pairs,
with mattresses or wire netting. Himmelstoss put these two
so that one occupied the upper and the other the lower bunk.
The man underneath of course had a vile time. The next night
they were changed over and the lower one put on top so that
he could retaliate. That was Himmelstoss’s system of self-
education.

The idea was low but not ill-conceived. Unfortunately it
accomplished nothing because the first assumption was wrong:
it was not laziness in either of them. Anyone who looked at
their sallow skin could see that. The matter ended in one of
them always sleeping on the floor, where he frequently caught
cold.

Meanwhile Haie sits down beside us. He winks at me and
rubs his paws thoughtfully. We once spent the finest day of
our army-life together—the day before we left for the front.
We had been allotted to one of the recently formed regiments,
but were first to be sent back for equipment to the garrison,
not to the reinforcement-depot, of course, but to another bar-
racks. We were due to leave the next morning early. In the
All Quiet on the Western Front 37

evening we prepared ourselves to square accounts with Him-
melstoss.

We had sworn for weeks past to do this. Kropp had even
gone so far as to propose entering the postal service in peace-
time in order to be Himmelstoss’s superior when he became a
postman again. He revelled in the thought of how he would
grind him. It was this that made it impossible for him to
crush us altogether—we always reckoned that later, at the end
of the war, we would have our revenge on him.

In the meantime we decided to give him a good hiding.
What could he do to us anyhow if he didn’t recognize us and
we left early in the morning?

We knew which pub he used to visit every evening. Re-
turning to the barracks he had to go along a dark, uninhabited
road. There we waited for him behind a pile of stones. I had a
bed-cover with me. We trembled with suspense, hoping he
would be alone. At last we heard his footstep, which we recog-
nized easily, so often had we heard it in the mornings as the
door flew open and he bawled: “Get up!”

“Alone?” whispered Kropp.

“Alone.”

I slipped round the pile of stones with Tjaden.

Himmelstoss seemed a little elevated; he was singing. His
belt-buckle gleamed. He came on unsuspectingly.

We seized the bed-cover, made a quick leap, threw it over
his head from behind and pulled it round him so that he stood
there in a white sack unable to raise his arms. The singing
stopped. The next moment Haie Westhus was there, and
spreading his arms he shoved us back in order to be first in.
He put himself in position with evident satisfaction, raised his
arm like a signal-mast and his hand like a coal-shovel and
38 Erich Maria Remarque

fetched such a blow on the white sack as would have felled
an ox.

Himmelstoss was thrown down, he rolled five yards and
started to yell. But we were prepared for that and had brought
a cushion. Haie squatted down, laid the cushion on his knees,
felt where Himmelstoss’s head was and pressed it down on the
pillow. Immediately his voice was muffled. Haie let him get a
gasp of air every so often, when he would give a mighty yell
that was immediately hushed.

Tjaden unbuttoned Himmelstoss’s braces and pulled down
his trousers, holding the whip meantime in his teeth. Then he
stood up and set to work.

It was a wonderful picture: Himmelstoss on the ground;
Haie bending over him with a fiendish grin and his mouth
open with bloodlust, Himmelstoss’s head on his knees; then
the convulsed striped drawers, the knock knees, executing at
every blow most original movements in the lowered breeches,
and towering over them like a woodcutter the indefatigable
Tjaden. In the end we had to drag him away to get our turn.

Finally Haie stood Himmelstoss on his feet again and gave
one last personal remonstrance. As he stretched out his right
arm preparatory to giving him a box on the ear he looked as if
he were going to reach down a star.

Himmelstoss toppled over. Haie stood him up again, made
ready and fetched him a second, well-aimed beauty with the
left hand. Himmelstoss yelled and made off on all fours. His
striped postman’s backside gleamed in the moonlight.

We disappeared at full speed.

Haie looked round once again and said wrathfully, satisfied
and rather mysteriously:

“Revenge is black-pudding.”

Himmelstoss ought to have been pleased; his saying that
All Quiet on the Western Front 39

we should each educate one another had borne fruit for him-
self. We had become successful students of his method.

He never discovered whom he had to thank for the busi-
ness. At any rate he scored a bed-cover out of it; for when we
returned a few hours later to look for it, it was no longer to be
found.

That evening's work made us more or less content to leave
next morning. And an old buffer was pleased to describe us as
“young heroes.”
Four

 

WE HAVE TO GO up on wiring fatigue. The motor lorries
roll up after dark. We climb in. It is a warm evening and the
twilight seems like a canopy under whose shelter we feel
drawn together. Even the stingy Tjaden gives me a cigarette
and then a light.

We stand jammed in together, shoulder to shoulder, there
is no room to sit. But we do not expect that. Miiller is in a
good mood for once; he is wearing his new boots.

The engines drone, the lorries bump and rattle. The roads
are worn and full of holes. We dare not show a light so we
lurch along and are often almost pitched out. That does not
worry us, however. It can happen if it likes; a broken arm is
better than a hole in the guts, and many a man would be
thankful enough for such a chance of finding his way home
again.

Beside us stream the munition-columns in long files. They
are making the pace, they overtake us continually. We joke
with them and they answer back.
All Quiet on the Western Front 41

A wall becomes visible, it belongs to a house which lies on
the side of the road. I suddenly prick up my ears. Am I de-
ceived? Again I hear distinctly the cackle of geese. A glance at
Katczinsky—a glance from him to me; we understand one
another.

“Kat, I hear some aspirants for the frying-pan over there.”

He nods. “It will be attended to when we come back. I have
their number.”

Of course Kat has their number. He knows all about every
leg of goose within a radius of fifteen miles.

The lorries arrive at the artillery lines. The gun-
emplacements are camouflaged with bushes against aerial ob-
servation, and look like a kind of military Feast of the
Tabernacles. These branches might seem gay and cheerful
were not cannon embowered there.

The air becomes acrid with the smoke of the guns and the
fog. The fumes of powder taste bitter on the tongue. The roar
of the guns makes our lorry stagger, the reverberation rolls
raging away to the rear, everything quakes. Our faces change
imperceptibly. We are not, indeed, in the front-line, but only
in the reserves, yet 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. Only the young recruits are agitated.
Kat explains to them: “That was a twelve-inch. You can tell
by the report; now you'll hear the burst.”

But the muffled thud of the burst does not reach us. It is
swallowed up in the general murmur of the front. Kat listens:
“There’ll be a bombardment to-night.”

We all listen. The front is restless. “The Tommies are firing
already,” says Kropp.
42 Erich Maria Remarque

The shelling can be heard distinctly. It is the English bat-
teries to the right of our section. They are beginning an hour
too soon. According to us they start punctually at ten o'clock.

“What's got them?” says Miiller, “their clocks must be
fast.”

“There’ll be a bombardment, I tell you. I can feel it in my
bones.” Kat shrugs his shoulders.

Three guns open fire close beside us. The burst of flame
shoots across the fog, the guns roar and boom. We shiver and
are glad to think that we shall be back in the huts early in the
morning.

Our faces are neither paler nor more flushed than usual;
they are not more tense nor more flabby—and yet they are
changed. We feel that in our blood a contact has shot home.
That is no figure of speech; it is fact. It is the front, the con-
sciousness of the front, that makes this contact. The moment
that the first shells whistle over and the air is rent with the
explosions there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our
eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a
strange sharpening of the senses. The body with one bound is
in full readiness.

It often seems to me as though it were the vibrating, shud-
dering air that with a noiseless leap springs upon us; or as
though the front itself emitted an electric current which
awakened unknown nerve-centres.

Every time it is the same. We start out for the front plain
soldiers, either cheerful or gloomy: then come the first gun-
emplacements and every word of our speech has a new ring.

When Kat stands in front of the hut and says: “There’ll be
a bombardment,” that is merely his own opinion; but if he
says it here, then the sentence has the sharpness of a bayonet
in the moonlight, it cuts clean through the thought, it thrusts
All Quiet on the Western Front 43

nearer and speaks to this unknown thing that is awakened in
us, a dark meaning—“There’ll be a bombardment.” Perhaps it
is our inner and most secret life that shivers and falls on guard.

To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in
still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vor-
tex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapable into itself.

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 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.

Earth!—Earth!-—Earth!

Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a
man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of ter-
ror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death
of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting
surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away
by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from
thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and
through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into
thee with our lips!

At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back,
in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal in-
stinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not
conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than

consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along
44 Erich Maria Remarque

without thought or heed;—suddenly he throws himself down
on the ground and a storm of fragments flies harmlessly over
him;—yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell
coming or to have thought of flinging himself down. But had
he not abandoned himself to the impulse he would now be a
heap of mangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in us,
that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our
knowing how. If it were not so, there would not be one man
alive from Flanders to the Vosges.

We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers—we reach
the zone where the front begins and become on the instant

human animals.

An indigent looking wood receives us. We pass by the soup-
kitchens. Under cover of the wood we climb out. The lorries
turn back. They are to collect us again in the morning before
dawn.

Mist and the smoke of guns lie breast-high over the
fields. The moon is shining. Along the road troops file. Their
helmets gleam softly in the moonlight. The heads and the ri-
fles stand out above the white mist, nodding heads, rocking
barrels.

Farther on the mist ends. Here the heads become figures;
coats, trousers, and boots appear out of the mist as from a
milky pool. They become a column. The column marches on,
straight ahead, the figures resolve themselves into a block, in-
dividuals are no longer recognizable, the dark wedge presses
onward, fantastically topped by the heads and the weapons
floating on the milky pool. A column—not men at all.

Guns and munition wagons are moving along a cross-road.
The backs of the horses shine in the moonlight, their move-
All Quiet on the Western Front 45

ments are beautiful, they toss their heads, and their eyes
gleam. The guns and the wagons float past the dim back-
ground of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel hel-
mets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely
beautiful and arresting.

We push on to the pioneer dump. Some of us load our
shoulders with pointed and twisted iron stakes; others thrust
smooth iron rods through rolls of wire and go off with them.
The burdens are awkward and heavy.

The ground becomes more broken. From ahead come
warnings: “Look out, deep shell-hole on the left”—*Mind,
trenches”

 

Our eyes peer out, our feet and our sticks feel in front of us
before they take the weight of the body. Suddenly the line
halts; I bump my face against the roll of wire carried by the
man in front and curse.

There are some shell-smashed lorries in the road. Another
order: “Cigarettes and pipes out.” We are near the line.

In the meantime it has become pitch dark. We skirt a small
wood and then have the front-line immediately before us.

An uncertain red glow spreads along the skyline from one
to the other. It is in perpetual movement, punctuated with the
bursts of flame from the nozzles of the batteries. Balls of light
rise up high above it, silver and red spheres which explode and
rain down in showers of red, white, and green stars. French
rockets go up, which unfold a sick parachute to the air and
drift slowly down. They light up everything as bright as day,
their light shines on us and we see our shadows sharply out-
lined on the ground. They hover for the space of a minute
before they burn out. Immediately fresh ones shoot up in the
sky, and again green, red, and blue stars.

“Bombardment,” says Kat.
46 Erich Maria Remarque

The thunder of the guns swells to a single heavy roar and
then breaks up again into separate explosions. The dry bursts
of the machine-guns rattle. Above us the air teems with invis-
ible swift movement, with howls, pipings, and hisses. They
are smaller shells;—and amongst them, booming through the
night like an organ, go the great coal-boxes and the heavies.
They have a hoarse, distant bellow like a rutting stag and
make their way high above the howl and whistle of the smaller
shells. It reminds me of flocks of wild geese when I hear them.
Last autumn the wild geese flew day after day across the path
of the shells.

The searchlights begin to sweep the dark sky. They slide
along it like gigantic tapering rulers. One of them pauses, and
quivers a little. Immediately a second is beside him, a black
insect is caught between them and tries to escape—the air-
man. He hesitates, is blinded and falls.

At regular intervals we ram in the iron stakes. Two men hold
a roll and the others spool off the barbed wire. It is that awful
stuff with close-set, long spikes. I am not used to unrolling it
and tear my hand.

After a few hours it is done. But there is still some time
before the lorries come. Most of us lie down and sleep. I try
also, but it has turned too chilly. We know we are not far from
the sea because we are constantly waked by the cold.

Once I fall fast asleep. Then wakening suddenly with a start
I do not know where I am. I see the stars, I see the rockets, and
for a moment have the impression that I have fallen asleep at
a garden féte. I don’t know whether it is morning or evening,
I lie in the pale cradle of the twilight, and listen for soft words
which will come, soft and near—am I crying? I put my hand
All Quiet on the Western Front 47

to my eyes, it is so fantastic, am I a child? Smooth skin;—it
lasts only a second, then I recognize the silhouette of Katczin-
sky. The old veteran, he sits quietly and smokes his pipe—a
covered pipe of course. When he sees I am awake, he says:
“That gave you a fright. It was only a nose-cap, it landed in
the bushes over there.”

I sit up, I feel myself strangely alone. It’s good Kat is there.
He gazes thoughtfully at the front and says:

“Mighty fine fire-works if they weren't so dangerous.”

One lands behind us. Some recruits jump up terrified. A
couple of minutes later another comes over, nearer this time.
Kat knocks out his pipe. “We're in for it.”

Then it begins in earnest. We crawl away as well as we can
in our haste. The next lands fair amongst us. Two fellows cry
out. Green rockets shoot up on the sky-line. Barrage. The
mud flies high, fragments whizz past. The crack of the guns is
heard long after the roar of the explosions.

Besides us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has
buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish
hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up,
pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm,
his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoul-
ders just like Kemmerich’s. I let him be. So that the helmet
should be of some use I stick it on his behind;—not for a jest,
but out of consideration, since that is his highest part. And
though there is plenty of meat there, a shot in it can be damned
painful. Besides, a man has to lie for months on his belly in
the hospital, and afterwards he would be almost sure to have a
limp.

It’s got someone pretty badly. Cries are heard between the
explosions.

At last it grows quiet. The fire has lifted over us and is now
48 Erich Maria Remarque

dropping on the reserves. We risk a look. Red rockets shoot
up to the sky. Apparently there’s an attack coming.

Where we are it is still quiet. I sit up and shake the recruit
by the shoulder. “All over, kid! It’s all right this time.”

He looks round him dazedly. “You'll get used to it soon,” I
tell him.

He sees his helmet and puts it on. Gradually he comes to.
Then suddenly he turns fiery red and looks confused. Cau-
tiously he reaches his hand to his behind and looks at me dis-
mally.

I understand at once: Gun-shy. That wasn’t the reason I had
stuck his helmet over it. “That’s no disgrace,” I reassure him:
“Many’s the man before you has had his pants full after the
first bombardment. Go behind that bush there and throw

 

your underpants away. Get along

He goes off. Things become quieter, but the cries do not cease.
“What's up, Albert?” I ask.

“A couple of columns over there got it in the neck.”

The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so
terribly.

“Wounded horses,” says Kat.

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.”

He is a farmer and very fond of horses. It gets under his
skin. Then as if deliberately the fire dies down again. The
screaming of the beasts becomes louder. One can no longer
All Quiet on the Western Front 49

distinguish whence in this now quiet silvery landscape it
comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven
and earth it rolls on immeasurably. Detering raves and yells
out: “Shoot them! Shoot them, can’t you? Damn you again!”

“They must look after the men first,” says Kat quietly.

We stand up and try to see where it is. If we could only see
the animals we should be able to endure it better. Miiller has
a pair of glasses. We see a dark group, bearers with stretchers,
and larger black clumps moving about. Those are the wounded
horses. But not all of them. Some gallop away in the distance,
fall down, and then run on farther. The belly of one is ripped
open, the guts trail out. He becomes tangled in them and
falls, then he stands up again.

Detering raises up his gun and aims. Kat hits it in the air.
x2

 

“Are you mad

Detering trembles and throws his rifle on the ground.

We sit down and hold our ears. But this appalling noise,
these groans and screams penetrate, they penetrate every-
where.

We can bear almost anything. But now the sweat breaks
out on us. We must get up and run no matter where, but
where these cries can no longer be heard. And it is not men,
only horses.

From the dark group stretchers move off again. Then single
shots crack out. The black heap convulses and then sinks
down. At last! But still it is not the end. The men cannot
overtake the wounded beasts which fly in their pain, their
wide open mouths full of anguish. One of the men goes down
on one knee, a shot—one horse drops—another. The last one
props itself on its forelegs and drags itself round in a circle
like a merry-go-round; squatting, it drags round in circles on
so Erich Maria Remarque

its stiffened forelegs, apparently its back is broken. The sol-
dier runs up and shoots it. Slowly, humbly, it sinks to the
ground.

We take our hands from our ears. The cries are silenced.
Only a long-drawn, dying sigh still hangs on the air.

Then only again the rockets, the singing of the shells and
the stars there—most strange.

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.”

We go back. It is time we returned to the lorries. The sky has
become brighter. Three o'clock in the morning. The breeze is
fresh and cool, the pale hour makes our faces look grey.

We trudge onward in single file through the trenches and
shell-holes and come again to the zone of mist. Katczinsky is
restive, that’s a bad sign.

“What's up, Kat?” says Kropp.

“I wish I were back home.” Home—he means the huts.

“We'll soon be out of it, Kat.”

He is nervous. “I don’t know, I don’t know

»

 

We come to the communication-trench and then to the
open fields. The little wood reappears; we know every foot of
ground here. There's the cemetery with the mounds and the
black crosses.

That moment it breaks out behind us, swells, roars, and
thunders. We duck down—a cloud of flame shoots up a hun-
dred yards ahead of us.

The next minute under a second explosion part of the wood
rises slowly in the air, three or four trees sail up and then crash
All Quiet on the Western Front 51

to pieces. The shells begin to hiss like safety-valves—heavy
fire

“Take cover!” yells somebody— “Cover!”

 

The fields are flat, the wood is too distant and dangerous—
the only cover is the graveyard and the mounds. We stumble
across in the dark and as though he had been spat there every
man lies glued behind a mound.

Not a moment too soon. The dark goes mad. It heaves and
raves. Darknesses blacker than the night rush on us with giant
strides, over us and away. The flames of the explosions light up
the graveyard.

There is no escape anywhere. By the light of the shells I try
to get a view of the fields. They are a surging sea, daggers of
flame from the explosions leap up like fountains. It is impos-
sible for anyone to break through it.

The wood vanishes, it is pounded, crushed, torn to pieces.
We must stay here in the graveyard.

The earth bursts before us. It rains clods. I feel a smack. My
sleeve is torn away by a splinter. I shut my fist. No pain. Still
that does not reassure me: wounds don’t hurt till afterwards. I
feel the arm all over. It is grazed but sound. Now a crack on
the skull, I begin to lose consciousness. Like lightning the
thought comes to me: Don’t faint! I sink down in the black
broth and immediately come up to the top again. A splinter
slashes into my helmet, but has already travelled so far that it
does not go through. I wipe the mud out of my eyes. A hole is
torn up in front of me. Shells hardly ever land in the same hole
twice, I'll get into it. With one lunge, I shoot as flat as a fish
over the ground; there it whistles again, quickly I crouch to-
gether, claw for cover, feel something on the left, shove in
beside it, it gives way, I groan, the earth leaps, the blast thun-
ders in my ears, I creep under the yielding thing, cover myself
52 Erich Maria Remarque

with it, draw it over me, it is wood, cloth, cover, cover, miser-
able cover against the whizzing splinters.

I open my eyes—my fingers grasp a sleeve, an arm. A
wounded man? I yell to him—no answer—a dead man. My
hand gropes farther, splinters of wood—now I remember
again that we are lying in the graveyard.

But the shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out
the sensibilities, I merely crawl still farther under the coffin,
it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it.

Before me gapes the shell-hole. I grasp it with my eyes as
with fists. With one leap I must be in it. There, I get a smack
in the face, a hand clamps onto my shoulder—has the dead
man waked up?—The hand shakes me, I turn my head, in the
second of light I stare into the face of Katczinsky, he has his
mouth wide open and is yelling. I hear nothing, he rattles me,
comes nearer, in a momentary lull his voice reaches me:
“Gas—Gaas—Gaaas—Pass it on.”

I grab for my gas-mask. Some distance from me there lies
someone. I think of nothing but this: That fellow there must
know: Gaaas—Gaaas

I call, I lean toward him, I swipe at him with the satchel, he

 

doesn’t see—once again, again—he merely ducks—it’s a re-
cruit—I look at Kat desperately, he has his mask on—I pull
out mine, too, my helmet falls to one side, it slips over my
face, I reach the man, his satchel is on the side nearest me, I
seize the mask, pull it over his head, he understands, I let go
and with a jump drop into the shell-hole.

The dull thud of the gas-shells mingles with the crashes of
the light explosives. A bell sounds between the explosions,
gongs, and metal clappers warning everyone—Gas—Gas—
Gaas.

Someone plumps down behind me, another. I wipe the
All Quiet on the Western Front 53

goggles of my mask clear of the moist breath. It is Kat, Kropp,
and someone else. All four of us lie there in heavy, watchful
suspense and breathe as lightly as possible.

These first minutes with the mask decide between life and
death: is it air-tight? I remember the awful sights in the hos-
pital: the gas patients who in day-long suffocation cough up
their burnt lungs in clots.

Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The
gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows.
Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls
there obscenely. I nudge Kat, it is better to crawl out and lie
on top than to stay where the gas collects most. But we don’t
get as far as that; a second bombardment begins. It is no lon-
ger as though shells roared; it is the earth itself raging.

With a crash something black bears down on us. It lands
close beside us; a coffin thrown up.

I see Kat move and I crawl across. The coffin has hit the
fourth man in our hole on his outstretched arm. He tries to
tear off his gas-mask with the other hand. Kropp seizes him
just in time, twists the hand sharply behind his back and
holds it fast.

Kat and I proceed to free the wounded arm. The coffin lid
is loose and bursts open, we are easily able to pull it off, we
toss the corpse out, it slides down to the bottom of the shell-
hole, then we try to loosen the under-part.

Fortunately the man swoons and Kropp is able to help us.
We no longer have to be careful, but work away till the cof-
fin gives with a sigh before the spade that we have dug in
under it.

It has grown lighter. Kat takes a piece of the lid, places it
under the shattered arm, and we wrap all our bandages round
it. For the moment we can do no more.
54 Erich Maria Remarque

Inside the gas-mask my head booms and roars—it is nigh
bursting. My lungs are tight, they breathe always the same
hot, used-up air, the veins on my temples are swollen. I feel I
am suffocating.

A grey light filters through to us. I climb out over the edge
of the shell-hole. In the dirty twilight lies a leg torn clean off;
the boot is quite whole, I take that all in at a glance. Now
something stands up a few yards distant. I polish the win-
dows, in my excitement they are immediately dimmed again.
I peer through them, the man there no longer wears his mask.

I wait some seconds—he has not collapsed—he looks
around and makes a few paces—rattling in my throat I tear
my mask off too and fall down, the air streams into me like
cold water, my eyes are bursting the wave sweeps over me and

extinguishes me.

The shelling has ceased, I turn towards the crater beckoning to
the others. They take off their masks. We lift up the wounded
man, one taking his splintered arm. And so we stumble off
hastily.

The graveyard is a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie
strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each of
them that was flung up saved one of us.

The hedge is destroyed, the rails of the light railway
are torn up and rise stiffly in the air in great arches. Someone
lies in front of us. We stop; Kropp goes on alone with the
wounded man.

The man on the ground is a recruit. His hip is covered
with blood; he is so exhausted that I feel for my water-bottle
where I have rum and tea. Kat restrains my hand and stoops

over him.
All Quiet on the Western Front 55

“Where's it got you comrade?”
His eyes move. He is too weak to answer.
We slit open his trousers carefully. He groans. “Gently,

”»

gently, it is much better

 

If he has been hit in the stomach, he oughtn’t to drink any-
thing. There’s no vomiting, that’s a good sign. We lay the hip
bare. It is one mass of mince-meat and bone splinters. The
joint has been hit. This lad won’t walk any more.

I wet his temples with a moistened finger and give him a
swig. His eyes move again. We see now that the right arm is
bleeding as well.

Kat spreads out two wads of dressing as wide as possible
so that they will cover the wound. I look for something to
bind loosely round it. We have nothing more, so I slip up
the wounded man’s trouser leg still farther in order to use a
piece of his underpants as a bandage. But he is wearing none.
I now look at him closely. He is the fair-headed boy of a little
while ago.

In the meantime Kat has taken a bandage from a dead man’s
pocket and we carefully bind the wound. I say to the young-
ster who looks at us fixedly: “We're going for a stretcher

now

 

”

Then he opens his mouth and whispers: “Stay here

 

“We'll be back again soon,” says Kat. “We are only going to
get a stretcher for you.”

We don’t know if he understands. He whimpers like a child
and plucks at us: “Don’t go away

 

Kat looks around and whispers: “Shouldn’t we just take a
revolver and put an end to it?”

The youngster will hardly survive the carrying, and at the
most he will only last a few days. What he has gone through
so far is nothing to what he’s in for till he dies. Now he is
56 Erich Maria Remarque

numb and feels nothing. In an hour he will become one
screaming bundle of intolerable pain. Every day that he can
live will be a howling torture. And to whom does it matter
whether he has them or not

 

I nod. “Yes, Kat, we ought to put him out of his misery.”

He stands still a moment. He has made up his mind. We
look round—but we are no longer alone. A little group is
gathering, from the shell-holes and trenches appear heads.

We get a stretcher.

Kat shakes his head. “Such a kid

»

 

"7 Hesrepeats it.

 

“Young innocents

Our losses are less than was to be expected—five killed and
eight wounded. It was in fact quite a short bombardment.
Two of our dead lie in the upturned graves. We merely throw
the earth in on them.

We go back. We trot off silently in single file one behind
the other. The wounded are taken to the dressing-station. The
morning is cloudy. The bearers make a fuss about numbers
and tickets, the wounded whimper. It begins to rain.

An hour later we reach our lorries and climb in. There is
more room now than there was. The rain becomes heavier. We
take out waterproof sheets and spread them over our heads.
The rain rattles down, and flows off at the sides in streams.
The lorries bump through the holes, and we rock to and fro in
a half-sleep.

Two men in the front of the lorry have long forked poles.
They watch for telephone wires which hang crosswise over the
road so low that they might easily pull our heads off. The two
fellows take them at the right moment on their poles and lift
All Quiet on the Western Front 57

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.

An explosion sounds somewhere. We wince, our eyes be-
come tense, our hands are ready to vault over the side of the
lorry into the ditch by the road.

Nothing happens—only the monotonous cry: “Mind—

wire,”—our knees bend—we are again half asleep.
Five

KILLING EACH separate louse is a tedious business when a
man has hundreds. The little beasts are hard and the everlast-
ing cracking with one’s fingernails very soon becomes weari-
some. So Tjaden has rigged up the lid of a boot-polish tin
with a piece of wire over the lighted stump of a candle. The
lice are simply thrown into this little pan. Crack! and they're
done for.

We sit around with our shirts on our knees, our bodies
naked to the warm air and our hands at work. Haie has a par-
ticularly fine brand of louse: they have a red cross on their
heads. He suggests that he brought them back from the hos-
pital at Thourhout, where they attended personally on a
surgeon-general. He says he means to use the fat that slowly
accumulates in the tin-lid for polishing his boots, and roars
with laughter for half an hour at his own joke.

But he gets little response to-day; we are too preoccupied
with another affair.

The rumour has materialized. Himmelstoss has come. He

 
All Quiet on the Western Front 59

appeared yesterday; we've already heard the well-known voice.
He seems to have overdone it with a couple of young recruits
on the ploughed field at home and unknown to him the son of
the local magistrate was watching. That cooked his goose.

He will get some surprises here. Tjaden has been meditat-
ing for hours what to say to him. Haie gazes thoughtfully at
his great paws and winks at me. The thrashing was the high
water mark of his life. He tells me he often dreams of it. Kropp
and Miiller are amusing themselves. From somewhere or
other, probably the pioneer-cookhouse, Kropp has bagged for
himself a mess-tin full of beans. Miiller squints hungrily into
it but checks himself and says: “Albert, what would you do if
it were suddenly peace-time again?”

“There won't be any peace-time,” says Albert bluntly.

“Well, but if—" persists Miiller, “what would you do?”

“Clear out of this!” growls Kropp.

“Of course. And then what?”

“Get drunk,” says Albert.

“Don’t talk rot, I mean seriously—"

“So do I,” says Kropp, “what else should a man do?”

Kat becomes interested. He levies tribute on Kropp’s tin of
beans, swallows some, then considers for a while and says:
“You might get drunk first, of course, but then you'd take the
next train for home and mother. Peace-time, man, Albert

 

He fumbles in his oil-cloth pocket-book for a photograph
and suddenly shows it all round. “My old woman!” Then he

”»

puts it back and swears: “Damned lousy war

 

“It’s all very well for you to talk,” I tell him. “You've a wife
and children.”

“True,” he nods, “and I have to see to it that they've some-
thing to eat.”
60 Erich Maria Remarque

We laugh. “They won't lack for that, Kat, you'd scrounge it
from somewhere.”

Miiller is insatiable and gives himself no peace. He wakes
Haie Westhus out of his dream. “Haie, what would you do if
it was peace-time?”

“Give you a kick in the backside for the way you talk,” I
say. “How does it come about exactly?”

“How does the cow-shit come on the roof?” retorts Miiller
laconically, and turns to Haie Westhus again.

It is too much for Haie. He shakes his freckled head:

“You mean when the war's over?”

“Exactly. You've said it.”

“Well, there'd be women of course, eh?”—Haie licks his
lips.

*Sure.”

“By Jove, yes,” says Haie, his face melting, “then I'd grab
some good buxom dame, some real kitchen wench with plenty
to get hold of, you know, and jump straight into bed. Just you
think, boys, a real feather-bed with a spring mattress; I
wouldn't put trousers on again for a week.”

Everyone is silent. The picture is too good. Our flesh creeps.
At last Miiller pulls himself together and says:

“And then what?”

A pause. Then Haie explains rather awkwardly: “If I were a
non-com. I'd stay with the Prussians and serve out my time.”

“Haie, you've got a screw loose, surely!” I say.

“Have you ever dug peat?” he retorts good-naturedly. “You
try it.”

Then he pulls a spoon out of the top of his boot and reaches
over into Kropp’s mess-tin.

“It can’t be worse than digging trenches,” I ventured.
All Quiet on the Western Front 61

Haie chews and grins: “It lasts longer though. And there’s
no getting out of it either.”

“But, man, surely it’s better at home.”

“Some ways,” says he, and with open mouth sinks into a
day-dream.

You can see what he is thinking. There is the mean little
hut on the moors, the hard work on the heath from morning
till night in the heat, the miserable pay, the dirty labourer’s
clothes.

“In the army in peace-time you've nothing to trouble
about,” he goes on, “your food’s found every day, or else you
kick up a row; you've a bed, every week clean underwear like
a perfect gent, you do your non-com.’s duty, you have a good
suit of clothes; in the evening you're a free man and go off to
the pub.”

Haie is extraordinarily set on his idea. He’s in love with it.

“And when your twelve years are up you get your pension
and become the village bobby, and you can walk about the
whole day.” |

He's already sweating on it. “And just you think how you'd
be treated. Here a dram, there a pint. Everybody wants to be
well in with a bobby.”

“You'll never be a non-com. though, Haie,” interrupts Kat.

Haie looks at him sadly and is silent. His thoughts still
linger over the clear evenings in autumn, the Sundays in the
heather, the village bells, the afternoons and evenings with
the servant girls, the fried bacon and barley, the carefree hours
in the ale-house

 

He can’t part with all these dreams so abruptly; he merely
growls: “What silly questions you do ask.”
He pulls his shirt over his head and buttons up his tunic.
62 Erich Maria Remarque

“What would you do, Tjaden!” asks Kropp.

Tjaden thinks of one thing only. “See to it that Himmel-
stoss didn’t get past me.”

Apparently he would like most to have him in a cage and
sail into him with a club every morning. To Kropp he says
warmly: “If I were in your place I'd see to it that I became a
lieutenant. Then you could grind him till the water in his
backside boils.”

“And you, Detering!” asks Miiller like an inquisitor. He's a
born schoolmaster with all his questions.

Detering is sparing with his words. But on this subject he
speaks. He looks at the sky and says only the one sentence: “I
would go straight on with the harvesting.”

Then he gets up and walks off.

He is worried. His wife has to look after the farm. They've
already taken away two more of his horses. Every day he reads
the papers that come, to see whether it is raining in his little
corner of Oldenburg. They haven't brought in the hay yet.

At this moment Himmelstoss appears. He comes straight
up to our group. Tjaden’s face turns red. He stretches his
length on the grass and shuts his eyes in excitement.

Himmelstoss is a little hesitant, his gait becomes slower.
Then he marches up to us. No one makes any motion to stand
up. Kropp looks up at him with interest.

He continues to stand in front of us and wait. As no one
says anything he launches a “Well!”

A couple of seconds go by. Apparently Himmelstoss doesn’t
quite know what to do. He would like most to set us all on the
run again. But he seems to have learned already that the front-
line isn’t a parade ground. He tries it on though, and by ad-
dressing himself to one instead of to all of us hopes to get
some response. Kropp is nearest, so he favours him.
All Quiet on the Western Front 63

“Well, you here too?”

But Albert's no friend of his. “A bit longer than you, I
fancy,” he retorts.

The red moustache twitches: “You don’t recognize me any
more, what?”

Tjaden now opens his eyes. “I do though.”

Himmelstoss turns to him: “Tjaden, isn’t it?”

Tjaden lifts his head. “And do you know what you are?”

Himmelstoss is disconcerted. “Since when have we become
so familiar? I don’t remember that we ever slept in the gutter
together?”

He has no idea what to make of the situation. He didn’t
expect this open hostility. But he is on his guard: he has al-
ready had some rot dinned into him about getting a shot in
the back.

The question about the gutter makes Tjaden so mad that he
becomes almost witty: “No you slept there by yourself.”

Himmelstoss begins to boil. But Tjaden gets in ahead of
him. He must bring off his insult: “Wouldn't you like to
know what you are? A dirty hound, that’s what you are. I've
been wanting to tell you that for a long time.”

The satisfaction of months shines in his dull pig’s eyes as he
spits out: “Dirty hound!”

Himmelstoss lets fly too, now. “What's that, you muck-
rake, you dirty peat-stealer? Stand up there, bring your heels
together when your superior officer speaks to you.”

Tjaden waves him off. “You take a run and jump at your-
self, Himmelstoss.”

Himmelstoss is a raging book of army regulations. The
Kaiser couldn’t be more insulted. “Tjaden, I command you, as
your superior officer: Stand up!”

“Anything else you would like?” asks Tjaden.
64 Erich Maria Remarque

“Will you obey my order or not?”

Tjaden replies, without knowing it, in the well-known
classical phrase.

At the same time he ventilates his backside.

“I'll have you court-martialled,” storms Himmelstoss.

We watch him disappear in the direction of the Orderly
Room. Haie and Tjaden burst into a regular peat-digger’s bel-
low. Haie laughs so much that he dislocates his jaw, and sud-
denly stands there helpless with his mouth wide open. Albert
has to put it back again by giving it a blow with his fist.

Kat is troubled: “If he reports you, it'll be pretty serious.”

“Do you think he will?” asks Tjaden.

“Sure to,” I say.

“The least you'll get will be five days close arrest,” says Kat.

That doesn’t worry Tjaden. “Five days clink are five days
rest.”

“And if they send you to the Fortress?” urges the thorough-
going Miiller.

“Well, for the time being the war will be over so far as I am
concerned.”

Tjaden is a cheerful soul. There aren’t any worries for him.
He goes off with Haie and Leer so that they won't find him in

the first flush of excitement.

Miiller hasn't finished yet. He tackles Kropp again.

“Albert, if you were really at home now, what would you
do?”

Kropp is contented now and more accommodating:

“How many of us were there in the class exactly?”

We count up: out of twenty, seven are dead, four wounded,

one in a mad-house. That makes twelve.
All Quiet on the Western Front 6s

“Three of them are lieutenants,” says Miiller. “Do you think
they would still let Kantorek sit on them?”

We guess not: we wouldn't let ourselves be sat on for that
matter.

“What do you mean by the three-fold theme in “William
Tell’?” says Kropp reminiscently, and roars with laughter.

“What was the purpose of the Poetic League of Gottingen?”
asked Miiller suddenly and earnestly. -

“How many children has Charles the Bald?” I interrupt
gently.

“You'll never make anything of your life, Baumer,” croaks
Miller.

“When was the battle of Zana?” Kropp wants to know.

“You lack the studious mind, Kropp, sit down, three mi-

nus

 

" Lsay.
“What offices did Lycurgus consider the most important for
the state?” asks Miller, pretending to take off his pince-nez.
“Does it go: ‘We Germans fear God and none else in the

whole world,” or “We, the Germans, fear God and rd

 

submit.

“How many inhabitants has Melbourne?” asks Miiller.

“How do you expect to succeed in life if you don’t know
that?” I ask Albert hotly.

Which he caps with: “What is meant by Cohesion?”

We remember mighty little of all that rubbish. Anyway, it
has never been the slightest use to us. At school nobody ever
taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how
a fire could be made with wet wood—nor that it is best to
stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get
jammed, as it does in the ribs.

Miiller says thoughtfully: “What's the use? We'll have to
go back and sit on the forms again.”
66 Erich Maria Remarque

I consider that out of the question. “We might take a spe-
cial exam.”

“That needs preparation. And if you do get through, what
then? A student’s life isn’t any better. If you have no money,
you have to work like the devil.”

“It’s a bit better. But it’s rot all the same, everything they
teach you.”

Kropp supports me: “How can a man take all that stuff se-
riously when he’s once been out here?”

>

“Still you must have an occupation of some sort,” insists
Miiller, as though he were Kantorek himself.

Albert cleans his nails with a knife. We are surprised at this
delicacy. But it is merely pensiveness. He puts the knife away
and continues: “That's just it. Kat and Detering and Haie will
go back to their jobs because they had them already. Him-
melstoss too. But we never had any. How will we ever get used
to one after this, here?”—he makes a gesture toward the front.

“What we'll want is a private income, and then we'll be
able to live by ourselves in a wood,” I say, but at once feel
ashamed of this absurd idea.

“But what will really happen when we go back?” wonders
Miiller, and even he is troubled.

Kropp gives a shrug. “I don’t know. Let's get back first,
then we'll find out.”

We are all utterly at a loss. “What could we do?” I ask.

“I don’t want to do anything,” replies Kropp wearily.
“You'll be dead one day, so what does it matter? I don’t think
we'll ever go back.”

“When I think about it, Albert,” I say after a while rolling
over on my back, “when I hear the word ‘peace-time,’ it goes
to my head: and if it really came, I think I would do some
All Quiet on the Western Front 67

unimaginable thing—something, you know, that it’s worth
having lain here in the muck for. But I can’t even imagine
anything. All I do know is that this business about professions
and studies and salaries and so on—it makes me sick, it is and
always was disgusting. I don’t see anything at all, Albert.”
All at once everything seems to me confused and hopeless.
Kropp feels it too. “It will go pretty hard with us all. But
nobody at home seems to worry much about it. Two years of
shells and bombs—a man won't peel that off as easy as a sock.”
We agree that it’s the same for everyone; not only for us
here, but everywhere, for everyone who is of our age; to some
more, and to others less. It is the common fate of our gen-
eration.
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 our-
selves. 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.

The Orderly Room shows signs of life. Himmelstoss seems to
have stirred them up. At the head of the column trots the fat
sergeant-major. It is queer that almost all of the regular
sergeant-majors are fat.

Himmelstoss follows him, thirsting for vengeance. His
boots gleam in the sun.

We get up.

“Where's Tjaden?” the sergeant puffs.
68 Erich Maria Remarque

No one knows, of course. Himmelstoss glowers at us wrath-
fully. “You know very well. You won't say, that’s the fact of the
matter. Out with it!”

Fatty looks round enquiringly; but Tjaden is not to be seen.
He tries another way.

“Tjaden will report at the Orderly Room in ten minutes.”

Then he steams off with Himmelstoss in his wake.

“I have a feeling that next time we go up wiring I'll be let-
ting a bundle of wire fall on Himmelstoss’s leg,” hints Kropp.

“We'll have quite a lot of jokes with him,” laughs Miiller.—

That is our sole ambition: to knock the conceit out of a
postman.

I go into the hut and put Tjaden wise. He disappears.

Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards.
We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight.
Not much for twenty years;—and yet too much for twenty
years.

Half an hour later Himmelstoss is back again. Nobody pays
any attention to him. He asks for Tjaden. We shrug our shoul-
ders.

“Then you'd better find him,” he persists. “Haven't you
been to look for him?”

Kropp lies back on the grass and says: “Have you ever been
out here before?”

“That’s none of your business,” retorts Himmelstoss. “I ex-
pect an answer.”

“Very good,” says Kropp, getting up. “See up there where
those little white clouds are. Those are anti-aircraft. We were
over there yesterday. Five dead and eight wounded. And that’s
a mere nothing. Next time, when you go up with us, before
they die the fellows will come up to you, click their heels, and
All Quiet on the Western Front 69
ask stiffly: ‘Please may I go? Please may I hop it? We've been

waiting here a long time for someone like you.”

He sits down again and Himmelstoss disappears like a
comet.

“Three days C.B.,” conjectures Kat.

“Next time I'll let fly,” I say to Albert.

But that is the end. The case comes up for trial in the eve-
ning. In the Orderly Room sits our Lieutenant, Bertink, and
calls us in one after another.

I have to appear as a witness and explain the reason of
Tjaden’s insubordination.

The story of the bed-wetting makes an impression. Him-
melstoss is recalled and I repeat my statement.

“Is that right?” Bertink asks Himmelstoss.

He tries to evade the question, but in the end has to con-
fess, for Kropp tells the same story.

“Why didn’t someone report the matter, then?” asks Ber-
tink.

We are silent: he must know himself how much use it is in
reporting such things. It isn’t usual to make complaints in the
army. He understands it all right though, and lectures Him-
melstoss, making it plain to him that the front isn’t a parade-
ground. Then comes Tjaden’s turn, he gets a long sermon and
three days’ open arrest. Bertink gives Kropp a wink and one
day’s open arrest. “It can’t be helped,” he says to him regret-
fully. He is a decent fellow.

Open arrest is quite pleasant. The clink was once a fowl-
house; there we can visit the prisoners, we know how to man-
age it. Close arrest would have meant the cellar.

They used to tie us to a tree, but that is forbidden now. In
many ways we are treated quite like men.
70 Erich Maria Remarque

An hour later after Tjaden and Kropp are settled in behind
their wire-netting we make our way into them. Tjaden greets
us crowing. Then we play skat far into the night. Tjaden wins
of course, the lucky wretch.

When we break it up Kat says to me: “What do you say to
some roast goose?”

“Not bad,” I agree.

We climb up on a munition-wagon. The ride costs us two
cigarettes. Kat has marked the spot exactly. The shed belongs
to a regimental headquarters. I agree to get the goose and re-
ceive my instructions. The out-house is behind the wall and
the door shuts with just a peg.

Kat hoists me up. I rest my foot in his hands and climb over
the wall. Kat keeps watch below.

I wait a few moments to accustom my eyes to the darkness.
Then I recognize the shed. Softly I steal across, lift the peg,
pull it out and open the door.

I distinguish two white patches. Two geese, that’s bad: if I
grab one the other will cackle. Well, both of them—if I'm
quick, it can be done.

I make a jump. I catch hold of one and the next instant the
second. Like a madman I bash their heads against the wall to
stun them. But I haven't quite enough weight. The beasts
cackle and strike out with their feet and wings. I fight desper-
ately, but Lord! what a kick a goose has! They struggle and I
stagger about. In the dark these white patches are terrifying.
My arms have grown wings and I'm almost afraid of going up
into the sky, as though I held a couple of captive balloons in
my fists.

Then the row begins; one of them gets his breath and goes
All Quiet on the Western Front 71

off like an alarmclock. Before I can do anything, something
comes in from outside; I feel a blow, lie outstretched on the
floor, and hear awful growls. A dog. I steal a glance to the side,
he makes a snap at my throat. I lie still and tuck my chin into
my collar.

It’s a bull dog. After an eternity he withdraws his head and
sits down beside me. But if I make the least movement he
growls. I consider. The only thing to do is to get hold of my
small revolver, and that too before anyone arrives. Inch by
inch I move my hand toward it.

I have the feeling that it lasts an hour. The slightest move-
ment and then an awful growl; I lie still, then try again. When
at last I have the revolver my hand starts to tremble. I press it
against the ground and say over to myself: Jerk the revolver
up, fire before he has a chance to grab, and then jump up.

Slowly I take a deep breath and become calmer. Then I hold
my breath, whip up the revolver, it cracks, the dog leaps howl-
ing to one side, I make for the door of the shed and fall head
over heels over one of the scuttering geese.

At full speed I seize it again, and with a swing toss it over
the wall and clamber up. No sooner am I on top than the dog
is up again as lively as ever and springs at me. Quickly I let
myself drop. Ten paces away stands Kat with the goose under
his arm. As soon as he sees me we run.

At last we can take a breather. The goose is dead, Kat saw
to that in a moment. We intend to roast it at once so that no-
body will be any wiser. I fetch a dixie and wood from the hut
and we crawl into a small deserted lean-to which we use for
such purposes. The single window space is heavily curtained.
There is a sort of hearth, an iron plate set on some bricks. We
kindle a fire.

Kat plucks and cleans the goose. We put the feathers care-
72 Erich Maria Remarque

fully to one side. We intend to make two cushions out of them
with the inscription: “Sleep soft under shell-fire.” The sound
of the gun-fire from the front penetrates into our refuge. The
glow of the fire lights up our faces, shadows dance on the wall.
Sometimes a heavy crash and the lean-to shivers. Aeroplane
bombs. Once we hear a stifled cry. A hut must have been hit.

Aeroplanes drone; the tack-tack of machine-guns breaks
out. But no light that could be observed shows from us.

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 com-
munion 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 crouch-
ing in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts
we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room:
flecked over with the lights and shadows of our feelings cast
by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? For-
merly we should not have had a single thought in common—
now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so
intimate that we do not even speak.

It takes a long time to roast a goose, even when it is young
and fat. So we take turns. One bastes it while the other lies
down and sleeps. A grand smell gradually fills the hut.

The noises without increase in volume, pass into my dream
and yet linger in my memory. In a half sleep I watch Kat dip
and raise the ladle. I love him, his shoulders, his angular,
stooping figure—and at the same time I see behind him woods
and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace,
to me, a soldier in big boots, belt, and knapsack, taking the
road that lies before him under the high heaven, quickly for-
All Quiet on the Western Front 73

getting and seldom sorrowful, for ever pressing on under the
wide night sky.

A little soldier and a clear voice, and if anyone were to ca-
ress him he would hardly understand, this soldier with the big
boots and the shut heart, who marches because he is wearing
big boots, and has forgotten all else but marching. Beyond the
sky-line is a country with flowers, lying so still that he would
like to weep. There are sights there that he has not forgotten,
because he never possessed them——perplexing, yet lost to him.
Are not his twenty summers there?

Is my face wet, and where am I? Kat stands before me, his
gigantic, stooping shadow falls upon me, like home. He
speaks gently, he smiles and goes back to the fire.

Then he says: “It’s done.”

"Yes, Kar?

I stir myself. In the middle of the room shines the brown
goose. We take out our collapsible forks and our pocket-knives
and each cuts off a leg. With it we have army bread dipped in
gravy. We eat slowly and with gusto.

“How does it taste, Kat?”

“Good! And yours?”

*Good, Kar.”

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.

“How would it be, Kat if we took a bit to Kropp and
Tjaden?”

“Sure,” says he.

We carve off a portion and wrap it up carefully in newspa-
per. The rest we thought of taking over to the hut. Kat laughs,
and simply says: “Tjaden.”
74 Erich Maria Remarque

I agree, we will have to take it all.

So we go off to the fowl-house to waken them. But first we
pack away the feathers.

Kropp and Tjaden take us for magicians. Then they get
busy with their teeth. Tjaden holds a wing in his mouth with
both hands like a mouth-organ, and gnaws. He drinks the
gravy from the pot and smacks his lips:

“May I never forget you!”

We go to our hut. Again there is the lofty sky with the stars
and the oncoming dawn, and I pass beneath it, a soldier with
big boots and a full belly, a little soldier in the early morning—
but by my side, stooping and angular, goes Kat, my comrade.

The outlines of the huts are upon us in the dawn like a
dark, deep sleep.
THERE ARE RUMOURS of an offensive. 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 dou-
ble 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 Miiller
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 organization sur-
passes itself in that kind of thing.

Ahead of us everything is shimmering. The first night we
try to get our bearings. When it is fairly quiet we can hear the
76 Erich Maria Remarque

transports behind the enemy lines rolling ceaselessly until
dawn. Kat says that they do not go back but are bringing up
troops—troops, munitions, and guns.

The English artillery has been strengthened, that we can
detect at once. There are at least four more batteries of nine-
‘inch guns to the right of the farm, and behind the poplars
they have put in trenchmortars. Besides these they have
brought up a number of those little French beasts with instan-
taneous fuses.

We are now in low spirits. After we have been in the dug-
outs two hours our own shells begin to fall in the trench. This
is the third time in four weeks. If it were simply a mistake in
aim no one would say anything, but the truth is that the bar-
rels are worn out. The shots are often so uncertain that they
land within our own lines. To-night 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 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 bomb-proof dug-out I may be
All Quiet on the Western Front 77

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.

The rats here are particularly repulsive, they are so fat—the
kind we all call corpse-rats. They have shocking, evil, naked
faces, and it is nauseating to see their long, nude tails.

They seem to be mighty hungry. Almost every man has had
his bread gnawed. Kropp wrapped his in his waterproof sheet
and put it under his head, but he cannot sleep because they
run over his face to get at it. Detering meant to outwit them:
he fastened a thin wire to the roof and suspended his bread
from it. During the night when he switched on his pocket-
torch he saw the wire swing to and fro. On the bread was rid-
ing a fat rat.

At last we put a stop to it. We cannot afford to throw the
bread away, because then we should have nothing left to eat in
the morning, so we carefully cut off the bits of bread that the
animals have gnawed.

The slices we cut off are heaped together in the middle of
the floor. Each man takes out his spade and lies down prepared
to strike. Detering, Kropp, and Kat hold their pocket-torches
ready.

After a few minutes we hear the first shuffling and tugging.
It grows, now it is the sound of many little feet. Then the
torches switch on and every man strikes at the heap, which
78 Erich Maria Remarque

scatters with a rush. The result is good. We toss the bits of rat
over the parapet and again lie in wait. :

Several times we repeat the process. At last the beasts get
wise to it, or perhaps they have scented the blood. They return
no more. Nevertheless, before morning the remainder of the
bread on the floor has been carried off.

In the adjoining sector they attacked two large cats and a
dog, bit them to death and devoured them.

Next day there was an issue of Edamer cheese. Each man
gets almost a quarter of a cheese. In one way that is all to the
good, for Edamer is tasty—but in another way it is vile, be-
cause the fat red balls have long been a sign of a bad time
coming. Our forebodings increase as rum is served out. We
drink it of course; but are not greatly comforted.

During the day we loaf about and make war on the rats.
Ammunition and hand-grenades become more plentiful. We
overhaul the bayonets—that is to say, the ones that have a saw
on the blunt edge. If the fellows over there catch a man with
one of those he’s killed at sight. In the next sector some of our
men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked
out with their own sawbayonets. Their mouths and noses were
stuffed with sawdust so that they suffocated.

Some of the recruits have bayonets of this sort; we take
them away and give them the ordinary kind.

But the bayonet has practically lost its importance. It is
usually the fashion now to charge with bombs and spades
only. The sharpened spade is a more handy and many-sided
weapon; not only can it be used for jabbing a man under the
chin, but it is much better for striking with because of its
greater weight; and if one hits between the neck and shoulder
it easily cleaves as far down as the chest. The bayonet fre-
quently jams on the thrust and then a man has to kick hard on
All Quiet on the Western Front 79

the other fellow’s belly to pull it out again; and in the interval
he may easily get one himself. And what's more the blade
often gets broken off.

At night they send over gas. We expect the attack to follow
and lie with our masks on, ready to tear them off as soon as the
first shadow appears.

Dawn approaches without anything happening—only the
everlasting, nerve-wracking roll behind the enemy lines,
trains, trains, lorries, lorries; but what are they concentrating?
Our artillery fires on it continually, but still it does not cease.

We have tired faces and avoid each other’s eyes. “It will be
like the Somme,” says Kat gloomily. “There we were shelled
steadily for seven days and nights.” Kat has lost all his fun
since we have been here, which is bad, for Kat is an old front-
hog, and can smell what is coming. Only Tjaden seems pleased
with the good rations and the rum; he thinks we might even
go back to rest without anything happening at all.

It almost looks like it. Day after day passes. At night I
squat in the listening-post. Above me the rockets and
parachute-lights shoot up and float down again. I am cautious
and tense, my heart thumps. My eyes turn again and again to
the luminous dial of my watch; the hands will not budge.
Sleep hangs on my eyelids, I work my toes in my boots in
order to keep awake. Nothing happens till I am relieved;—
only the everlasting rolling over there. Gradually we grow
calmer and play skat and poker continually. Perhaps we will
be lucky.

All day the sky is hung with observation balloons. There is
a rumour that the enemy are going to put tanks over and use
low-flying planes for the attack. But that interests us less than
what we hear of the new flame-throwers.

We wake up in the middle of the night. The earth booms.
8o Erich Maria Remarque

Heavy fire is falling on us. We crouch into corners. We distin-
guish shells of every calibre.

Each man lays hold of his things and looks again every min-
ute to reassure himself that they are still there. The dug-out
heaves, the night roars and flashes. We look at each other in
the momentary flashes of light, and with pale faces and pressed
lips shake our heads.

Every man is aware of the heavy shells tearing down the
parapet, rooting up the embankment and demolishing the
upper layers of concrete. When a shell lands in the trench we
note how the hollow, furious blast is like a blow from the paw
of a raging beast of prey. Already by morning a few of the re-
cruits are green and vomiting. They are too inexperienced.

Slowly the grey light trickles into the post and pales the
flashes of the shells. Morning is come. The explosion of mines
mingles with the gunfire. That is the most dementing convul-
sion of all. The whole region where they go up becomes one
grave.

The reliefs go out, the observers stagger in, covered with
dirt, and trembling. One lies down in silence in the corner
and eats, the other, an older man of the new draft, sobs; twice
he has been flung over the parapet by the blast of the explo-
sions without getting any more than shell-shock.

The recruits are eyeing him. We must watch them, these
things are catching, already some lips begin to quiver. It is
good that it is growing daylight; perhaps the attack will come
before noon.

The bombardment does not diminish. It is falling in the
rear too. As far as one can see spout fountains of mud and iron.
A wide belt is being raked.

The attack does not come, but the bombardment contin-
All Quiet on the Western Front 81

ues. We are gradually benumbed. Hardly a man speaks. We
cannot make ourselves understood.

Our trench is almost gone. At many places it is only eigh-
teen inches high, it is broken by holes, and craters, and moun-
tains of earth. A shell lands square in front of our post. At once
it is dark. We are buried and must dig ourselves out. After an
hour the entrance is clear again, and we are calmer because we
have had something to do.

Our Company Commander scrambles in and reports that
two dug-outs are gone. The recruits calm themselves when
they see him. He says that an attempt will be made to bring
up food this evening.

That sounds reassuring. No one had thought of it except
Tjaden. Now the outside world seems to draw a little nearer:
if food can be brought up, think the recruits, then it can’t
really be so bad.

We do not disabuse them; we know that food is as important
as ammunition and only for that reason must be brought up.

But it miscarries. A second party goes out, and it also turns
back. Finally Kat tries, and even he reappears without accom-
plishing anything. No one gets through, not even a fly is small
enough to get through such a barrage.

We pull in our belts tighter and chew every mouthful
three times as long. Still the food does not last out; we are
damnably hungry. I take out a scrap of bread, eat the white
and put the crust back in my knapsack; from time to time I
nibble at it.

The night is unbearable. We cannot sleep, but stare ahead of
us and doze. Tjaden regrets that we wasted the gnawed pieces
82 Erich Maria Remarque

of bread on the rats. We would gladly have them again to eat
now. We are short of water, too, but not seriously yet.

Towards morning, while it is still dark, there is some ex-
citement. Through the entrance rushes in a swarm of fleeing
rats that try to storm the walls. Torches light up the confu-
sion. Everyone yells and curses and slaughters. The madness
and despair of many hours unloads itself in this outburst.
Faces are distorted, arms strike out, and the beasts scream; we
just stop in time to avoid attacking one another.

The onslaught has exhausted us. We lie down to wait again.
It is a marvel that our post has had no casualties so far. It is one
of the less deep dugouts.

A corporal creeps in; he has a loaf of bread with him. Three
people have had the luck to get through during the night and
bring some provisions. They say the bombardment extends
undiminished as far as the artillery lines. It is a mystery where
the enemy gets all his shells.

We wait and wait. By midday what I expected happens.
One of the recruits has a fit. I have been watching him for a
long time, grinding his teeth and opening and shutting his
fists. These hunted, protruding eyes, we know them too well.
During the last few hours he has had merely the appearance of
calm. He had collapsed like a rotten tree.

Now he stands up, stealthily creeps across the floor, hesi-
tates a moment and then glides towards the door. I intercept
him and say: “Where are you going?”

“I'll be back in a minute,” says he, and tries to push
past me.

“Wait a bit, the shelling will stop soon.”

He listens for a moment and his eyes become clear. Then
again he has the glowering eyes of a mad dog, he is silent, he

shoves me aside.
All Quiet on the Western Front 83

“One minute, lad,” I say. Kat notices. Just as the recruit
shakes me off Kat jumps in and we hold him.

Then he begins to rave: “Leave me alone, let me go out, I
will go out!”

He won't listen to anything and hits out, his mouth is wet
and pours out words, half choked, meaningless words. It is a
case of claustrophobia, he feels as though he is suffocating here
and wants to get out at any price. If we let him go he would
run about everywhere regardless of cover. He is not the first.

Though he raves and his eyes roll, it can’t be helped, we
have to give him a hiding to bring him to his senses. We do it
quickly and mercilessly, and at last he sits down quietly. The
others have turned pale; let’s hope it deters them. This bom-
bardment is too much for the poor devils, they have been sent
straight from a recruiting-depot into a barrage that is enough
to turn an old soldier’s hair grey.

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 dug-out cracks
in all its joints under a direct hit, fortunately only a light one
that the concrete blocks are able to withstand. It rings metal-
lically, the walls reel, rifles, helmets, earth, mud, and dust fly
everywhere. Sulphur fumes pour in.

If we were in one of those light dug-outs that they have
been building lately instead of this deeper one, none of us
would be alive.

But the effect is bad enough even so. The recruit starts to
rave again and two others follow suit. One jumps up and
rushes out, we have trouble with the other two. I start after
one who escapes and wonder whether to shoot him in the
leg—then it shrieks again, I fling myself down and when I
84 Erich Maria Remarque

stand up the wall of the trench is plastered with smoking
splinters, lumps of flesh, and bits of uniform. I scramble back.

The first recruit seems actually to have gone insane. He
butts his head against the wall like a goat. We must try to-
night to take him to the rear. Meanwhile we bind him, but in
such a way that in case of attack he can be released at once.

Kat suggests a game of skat: it is easier when a man has
something to do. But it is no use, we listen for every explosion
that comes close, miscount the tricks, and fail to follow suit.
We have to give it up. We sit as though in a boiler that is
being belaboured from without on all sides.

Night again. We are deadened by the strain—a deadly ten-
sion that scrapes along one’s spine like a gapped knife. Our
legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, our bodies are a thin
skin stretched painfully over repressed madness, over an al-
most irresistible, bursting roar. We have neither flesh nor
muscles any longer, we dare not look at one another for fear of
some miscalculable thing. So we shut our teeth—it will
end—it will end—perhaps we will come through.

Suddenly the nearer explosions cease. The shelling contin-
ues but it has lifted and falls behind us, our trench is free. We
seize the hand-grenades, pitch them out in front of the dug-
out and jump after them. The bombardment has stopped and
a heavy barrage now falls behind us. The attack has come.

No one would believe that in this howling waste there
could still be men; but steel helmets now appear on all sides
out of the trench, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun is
already in position and barking.

The wire entanglements are torn to pieces. Yet they offer
some obstacle. We see the storm-troops coming. Our artillery
opens fire. Machine-guns rattle, rifles crack. The charge works
its way across. Haie and Kropp begin with the hand-grenades.
All Quiet on the Western Front 8s

They throw as fast as they can, others pass them, the handles
with the strings already pulled. Haie throws seventy-five
yards, Kropp sixty, it has been measured, the distance is im-
portant. The enemy as they run cannot do much before they
are within forty yards.

We recognize the smooth distorted faces, the helmets; they
are French. They have already suffered heavily when they
reach the remnants of the barbed wire entanglements. A whole
line has gone down before our machine-guns; then we have a
lot of stoppages and they come nearer.

I see one of them, his face upturned, fall into a wire cradle.
His body collapses, his hands remain suspended as though he
were praying. Then his body drops clean away and only his
hands with the stumps of his arms, shot off, now hang in the
wire.

The moment we are about to retreat three faces rise up from
the ground in front of us. Under one of the helmets a dark
pointed beard and two eyes that are fastened on me. I raise my
hand, but I cannot throw into those strange eyes; for one mad
moment the whole slaughter whirls like a circus around me,
and these two eyes alone are motionless; then the head rises
up, a hand, a movement, and my hand-grenade flies through
the air and into him.

We make for the rear, pull wire cradles into the trench and
leave bombs behind us with the strings pulled, which ensures
us a fiery retreat. The machine-guns are already firing from
the next position.

We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend
ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we
fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment
when Death is hunting us down—now, for the first time in
three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three
86 Erich Maria Remarque

days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we
lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill,
to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.

We crouch behind every corner, behind every barrier of
barbed wire, and hurl heaps of explosives at the feet of the
advancing enemy before we run. The blast of the hand-
grenades impinges powerfully on our arms and legs; crouch-
ing like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears
us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into
murderers, into God only knows what devils; 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.

It is nearly noon. The sun blazes hotly, the sweat stings in our
eyes, we wipe it off on our sleeves and often blood with it. At
last we reach a trench that is in a somewhat better condition.
It is manned and ready for the counter-attack, it receives us.
Our guns open in full blast and cut off the enemy attack.

The lines behind us stop. They can advance no farther. The
attack is crushed by our artillery. We watch. The fire lifts a
hundred yards and we break forward. Beside me a lance-
corporal has his head torn off. He runs a few steps more while
the blood spouts from his neck like a fountain.

It does not come quite to hand-to-hand fighting; they are
All Quiet on the Western Front 87

driven back. We arrive once again at our shattered trench and
pass on beyond it.

Oh, this turning back again! We reach the shelter of the
reserves and yearn to creep in and disappear;—but instead we
must turn round and plunge again into the horror. If we were
not automata at that moment we would continue lying there,
exhausted, and without will. But we are swept forward again,
powerless, madly savage and raging; we will kill, for they are
still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are aimed
against us, and if we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us.

The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy
shine under the sun’s rays; the earth is the background of this
restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the
scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched
with stupor—thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced
and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown
earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers,
who lie there—it can’t be helped—who cry and clutch at our
legs as we spring away over them.

We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly con-
trol 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!l—a blow from a spade cleaves
through his face. A second sees it and tries to run farther; a
bayonet jabs into his back. He leaps in the air, his arms thrown
wide, his mouth wide open, yelling; he staggers, in his back
the bayonet quivers. A third throws away his rifle, cowers
down with his hands before his eyes. He is left behind with a
few other prisoners to carry off the wounded.
88 Erich Maria Remarque

Suddenly in the pursuit we reach the enemy line.

We are so close on the heels of our retreating enemies that
we reach it almost at the same time as they. In this way we
suffer few casualties. A machine-gun barks, but is silenced
with a bomb. Nevertheless, the couple of seconds has sufficed
to give us five stomach wounds. With the butt of his rifle Kat
smashes to pulp the face of one of the unwounded machine-
gunners. We bayonet the others before they have time to get
out their bombs. Then thirstily we drink the water they have
for cooling the gun.

Everywhere wire-cutters are snapping, planks are thrown
across the entanglements, we jump through the narrow en-
trances into the trenches. Haie strikes his spade into the neck
of a gigantic Frenchman and throws the first hand-grenade;
we duck behind a breastwork for a few seconds, then the
straight bit of trench ahead of us is empty. The next throw
whizzes obliquely over the corner and clears a passage; as we
run past we toss handfuls down into the dug-outs, the earth
shudders, it crashes, smokes and groans, we stumble over slip-
pery lumps of flesh, over yielding bodies; I fall into an open
belly on which lies a clean, new officer’s cap.

The fight ceases. We lose touch with the enemy. We cannot
stay here long but must retire under cover of our artillery to
our own position. No sooner do we know this than we dive
into the nearest dug-outs, and with the utmost haste seize on
whatever provisions we can see, especially the tins of corned
beef and butter, before we clear out.

We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the
enemy. We lie for an hour panting and resting before anyone
speaks. We are so completely played out that in spite of our
great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradu-

ally we become something like men again.
All Quiet on the Western Front 89

The corned beef over there is famous along the whole front.
Occasionally it has been the chief reason for a flying raid on
our part, for our nourishment is generally very bad; we have a
constant hunger.

We bagged five tins altogether. The fellows over there are
well looked after; they fare magnificently, as against us, poor
starving wretches, with our turnip jam; they can get all the
meat they want. Haie has scored a thin loaf of white French
bread, and stuck it behind his belt like a spade. It is a bit
bloody at one corner, but that can be cut off.

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 dug-out; 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.

The evening benediction begins. Night comes, out of the cra-
ters rise the mists. It looks as though the holes were full of
ghostly secrets. The white vapour creeps painfully round be-
fore it ventures to steal away over the edge. Then long streaks
stretch from crater to crater.

It is chilly. I am on sentry and stare into the darkness. My
strength is exhausted as always after an attack, and so it is
hard for me to be alone with my thoughts. They are not prop-
erly thoughts; they are memories which in my weakness haunt
me and strangely move me.

The parachute-lights soar upwards—and I see a picture, a
summer evening, I am in the cathedral cloister and look at the
tall rose trees that bloom in the middle of the little cloister
garden where the monks lie buried. Around the walls are the
90 Erich Maria Remarque

stone carvings of the Stations of the Cross. No one is there. A
great quietness rules in this blossoming quadrangle, the sun
lies warm on the heavy grey stones, I place my hand upon
them and feel the warmth. At the right-hand corner the green
cathedral spire ascends into the pale blue sky of the evening.
Between the glowing columns of the cloister is the cool dark-
ness that only churches have, and I stand there and wonder
whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the be-
wildering emotions of love.

The image is alarmingly near; it touches me before it dis-
solves in the light of the next starshell.

I lay hold of my rifle to see that it is in trim. The barrel is
wet, I take it in my hands and rub off the moisture with my
fingers.

Between the meadows behind our town there stands a line
of old poplars by a stream. They were visible from a great dis-
tance, and although they grew on one bank only, we called
them the poplar avenue. Even as children we had a great love
for them, they drew us vaguely thither, we played truant the
whole day by them and listened to their rustling. We sat be-
neath them on the bank of the stream and let our feet hang in
the bright, swift waters. The pure fragrance of the water and
the melody of the wind in the poplars held our fancies. We
loved them dearly, and the image of those days still makes my
heart pause in its beating.

It is strange that all the memories that come have these two
qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predomi-
nant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they be-
come so. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me,
with looks and gestures silently, without any word—and it is
the alarm of their silence that forces me to lay hold of my
sleeve and my rifle lest I should abandon myself to the libera-
All Quiet on the Western Front 91

tion and allurement in which my body would dilate and gen-
tly pass away into the still forces that lie behind these things.

They are quiet in this way, because quietness is so unattain-
able for us now. At the front there is no quietness and the
curse of the front reaches so far that we never pass beyond it.
Even in the remote depots and rest-areas the droning and the
muffled noise of shelling is always in our ears. We are never so
far off that it is no more to be heard. But these last few days it
has been unbearable.

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former
times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inap-
prehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires—but they
return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is
gone from us. In the barracks they called forth a rebellious,
wild craving for their return; for then they were still bound to
us, we belonged to them and they to us, even though we were
already absent from them. They appeared in the soldiers’
songs which we sang as we marched between the glow of the
dawn and the black silhouettes of the forests to drill on the
moor, they were a powerful remembrance that was in us and
came from us.

But here in the trenches they are completely lost to us.
They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the
horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition, that
haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong
and our desire is strong—but they are unattainable, and we
know it.

And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us
we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influ-
ence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We
might be amongst them and move in them; we might remem-
ber and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it
92 Erich Maria Remarque

would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade;
those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent to-
gether take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man
himself it is not.

We could never regain the old intimacy with those scenes.
It was not any recognition of their beauty and their signifi-
cance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a
comradeship with the things and events of our existence,
which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing
incomprehensible to us—for then we surrendered ourselves to
events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was
enough to carry us down the stream of eternity. Perhaps it was
only the privilege of our youth, but as yet we recognized no
limits and saw nowhere an end. We had that thrill of expecta-
tion in the blood which united us with the course of our days.

To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like
travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we
understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are
no longer untroubled—we are indifferent. We might exist
there; but should we really live there?

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men,
we are crude and sorrowful and superficial —I believe we are

lost.

My hands grow cold and my flesh creeps; and yet the night is
warm. Only the mist is cold, this mysterious mist that trails
over the dead and sucks from them their last, creeping life. By
morning they will be pale and green and their blood con-
gealed and black.

Still the parachute-rockets shoot up and cast their pitiless
All Quiet on the Western Front 93

light over the stony landscape, which is full of craters and
frozen lights like a moon. The blood beneath my skin brings
fear and restlessness into my thoughts. They become feeble
and tremble, they want warmth and life. They cannot persist
without solace, without illusion, they are disordered before
the naked picture of despair.

I hear the rattle of the mess-tins and immediately feel a
strong desire for warm food; it would do me good and comfort
me. Painfully I force myself to wait until I am relieved.

Then I go into the dug-out and find a mug of barley. It is
cooked in fat and tastes good, I eat it slowly. I remain quiet,
though the others are in a better mood, for the shelling has
died down.

The days go by and the incredible hours follow one another as
a matter of course. Attacks alternate with counter-attacks and
slowly the dead pile up in the field of craters between the
trenches. We are able to bring in most of the wounded that do
not lie too far off. But many have long to wait and we listen to
them dying.

For one of them we search two days in vain. He must be
lying on his belly and unable to turn over. Otherwise it is hard
to understand why we cannot find him; for it is only when a
man has his mouth close to the ground that it is impossible to
gauge the direction of his cry.

He must have been badly hit—one of those nasty wounds
neither so severe that they exhaust the body at once and a man
dreams on in a half-swoon, nor so light that a man endures the
pain in the hope of becoming well again. Kat thinks he has
either a broken pelvis or a shot through the spine. His chest
94 Erich Maria Remarque

cannot have been injured otherwise he would not have such
strength to cry out. And if it were any other kind of wound it
would be possible to see him moving.

He grows gradually hoarser. The voice is so strangely
pitched that it seems to be everywhere. The first night some
of our fellows go out three times to look for him. But when
they think they have located him and crawl across, the next
time they hear the voice it seems to come from somewhere else
altogether.

We search in vain until dawn. We scrutinize the field all
day with glasses, but discover nothing. On the second day the
calls are fainter; that will be because his lips and mouth have
become dry.

Our Company Commander has promised next turn of leave
with three days extra to anyone who finds him. This is a pow-
erful inducement, but we would do all that is possible with-
out that for his cry is terrible. Kat and Kropp even go out in
the afternoon, and Albert gets the lobe of his ear shot off in
consequence. It is to no purpose, they come back without
him.

It is easy to understand what he cries. At first he called only
for help—the second night he must have had some delirium,
he talked with his wife and his children, we often detected the
name Elise. To-day he merely weeps. By evening the voice
dwindles to a croaking. But it persists still through the whole
night. We hear it so distinctly because the wind blows toward
our line. In the morning when we suppose he must already
have long gone to his rest, there comes across to us one last
gurgling rattle.

The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cannot
fetch them all in, if we did we should not know what to do
with them. The shells will bury them. Many have their bellies
All Quiet on the Western Front 95

swollen up like balloons. They hiss, belch, and make move-
ments. The gases in them make noises.

The sky is blue and without clouds. In the evening it grows
sultry and the heat rises from the earth. When the wind blows
toward us it brings the smell of blood, which is very heavy and
sweet. This deathly exhalation from the shell-holes seems to
be a mixture of chloroform and putrefaction, and fills us with
nausea and retching.

The nights become quiet and the hunt for copper driving-
bands and the silken parachutes of the French star-shells be-
gins. Why the driving-bands are so desirable no one knows
exactly. The collectors merely assert that they are valuable.
Some have collected so many that they will stoop under the
weight of them when we go back.

But Haie at least gives a reason. He intends to give them to
his girl to supplement her garters. At this the Friesians ex-
plode with mirth. They slap their knees: “By Jove though,
he’s a wit, Haie is, he’s got brains.” Tjaden especially can
hardly contain himself; he takes the largest of the rings in his
' hand and every now and then puts his legs through it to show
how much slack there is.

 

“Haie, man, she must have legs like, legs ” his thoughts
mount somewhat higher “and a behind too she must have,
like a—Ilike an elephant!”

He cannot get over it. “I wish I could play hothand with

her once, my hat

 

Haie beams, proud that his girl should receive so much ap-
preciation.

“She’s a nice bit,” he says with self-satisfaction.

The parachutes are turned to more practical uses. Accord-
ing to the size of the bust three or perhaps four will make a
blouse. Kropp and I use them as handkerchiefs. The others
96 Erich Maria Remarque

send them home. If the women could see at what risk these
bits of rag are often obtained, they would be horrified.

Kat surprises Tjaden endeavouring with perfect equanim-
ity to knock the driving-band off a dud. If anyone else had
tried it the thing would have exploded, but Tjaden always has
his luck with him.

One morning two butterflies play in front of our trench.
They are brimstone-butterflies, with red spots on their yellow
wings. What can they be looking for here? There is not a plant
nor a flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull. The
birds too are just as carefree, they have long since accustomed
themselves to the war. Every morning larks ascend from No
Man’s Land. A year ago we watched them nesting; the young
ones grew up too.

We have a spell from the rats in the trench. They are in No
Man's Land—we know what for. They grow fat; when we see
one we have a crack at it. At night we hear again the rolling
behind the enemy lines. All day we have only the normal
shelling, so that we are able to repair the trenches. There is
always plenty of amusement, the airmen see to that. There are
countless fights for us to watch every day.

Battle planes don’t trouble us, but the observation planes
we hate like the plague; they put the artillery to us. A few
minutes after they appear, shrapnel and high-explosives begin
to drop on us. We lose eleven men in one day that way, and
five of them stretcher-bearers. Two are smashed so that Tjaden
remarks you could scrape them off the wall of the trench with
a spoon and bury them in a mess-tin. Another has the lower
part of his body and his legs torn off. Dead, his chest leans
against the side of the trench, his face is lemon-yellow, in his
beard still burns a cigarette. It glows until it dies out on his

lips.
All Quiet on the Western Front 97

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 an-
ticipation.

Attack, counter-attack, charge, repulse—these are words,
but what things they signify! We have lost a good many
men, mostly recruits. Reinforcements have again been sent
up to our sector. They are one of the new regiments, com-
posed almost entirely of young fellows just called up. They
have had hardly any training, and are sent into the field with
only a theoretical knowledge. They do know what a hand-
grenade is, it is true, but they have very little idea of cover,
and what is most important of all, have no eye for it. A fold
in the ground has to be quite eighteen inches high before
they can see it.

Although we need reinforcement, the recruits give us al-
most more trouble than they are worth. They are helpless in
this grim fighting area, they fall like flies. Modern trench-
warfare demands knowledge and experience; a man must have
a feeling for the contours of the ground, an ear for the sound
and character of the shells, must be able to decide beforehand
where they will drop, how they will burst, and how to shelter
from them.

The young recruits of course know none of these things.
They get killed simply because they hardly can tell shrapnel
from high-explosive, they are mown down because they are
listening anxiously to the roar of the big coal-boxes falling in
the rear, and miss the light, piping whistle of the low spread-
ing daisy-cutters. They flock together like sheep instead of
08 Erich Maria Remarque

scattering, and even the wounded are shot down like hares by
the airmen.

Their pale turnip faces, their pitiful clenched hands, the
fine courage of these poor devils, the desperate 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 expression-
lessness of dead children.

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 nar-
row, their bodies too slight; no uniform was ever made to
these childish measurements.

Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand.

A surprise gas-attack carries off a lot of them. They have
not yet learned what to do. We found one dug-out full of
them, with blue heads and black lips. Some of them in a shell-
hole took off their masks too soon; they did not know that
the gas lies longest in the hollows; when they saw others on
top without masks they pulled theirs off too and swallowed
enough to scorch their lungs. Their condition is hopeless, they
choke to death with haemorrhages and suffocation.

In one part of the trench I suddenly run into Himmelstoss.
We dive into the same dug-out. Breathless we are all lying one

beside the other waiting for the charge.
All Quiet on the Western Front 99

When we run out again, although I am very excited, I sud-
denly think: “Where's Himmelstoss?” Quickly I jump back
into the dug-out and find him with a small scratch lying in a
corner pretending to be wounded. His face looks sullen. He is
in a panic; he is new to it too. But it makes me mad that the
young recruits should be out there and he here.

*Get.out!” 1 spit.

He does not stir, his lips quiver, his moustache twitches.

“Out!” I repeat.

He draws up his legs, crouches back against the wall, and
shows his teeth like a cur.

I seize him by the arm and try to pull him up. He barks.

This is too much for me. I grab him by the neck and shake
him like a sack, his head jerks from side to side.

“You lump, will you get out—you hound, you skunk, sneak
out of it, would you?” His eye becomes glassy, I knock his
head against the wall—“You cow”—1I kick him in the ribs—
“You swine”—1I push him toward the door and shove him out
head first.

Another wave of our attack has just come up. A lieutenant
is with them. He sees us and yells: “Forward, forward, join in,
follow.” And the word of command does what all my banging
could not. Himmelstoss hears the order, looks round him as if
awakened, and follows on.

I come after and watch him go over. Once more he is the
smart Himmelstoss of the parade-ground, he has even out-
stripped the lieutenant and is far ahead.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks,
machine-guns, hand-grenades—words, words, but they hold
the horror of the world.

Our faces are encrusted, our thoughts are devastated, we are
weary to death; when the attack comes we shall have to strike
100 Erich Maria Remarque

many of the men with our fists to waken them and make them
come with us—our eyes are burnt, our hands are torn, our
knees bleed, our elbows are raw.

How long has it been? Weeks—months—years? Only days.
We see time pass in the colourless faces of the dying, we cram
food into us, we run, we throw, we shoot, we kill, we lie about,
we are feeble and spent, and nothing supports us but the
knowledge that there are still feebler, still more spent, still
more helpless ones there who, with staring eyes, look upon us
as gods that escape death many times.

In the few hours of rest we teach them. “There, see that
waggle-top? That's a mortar coming. Keep down, it will go
clean over. But if it comes this way, then run for it. You can
run from a mortar.”

We sharpen their ears to the malicious, hardly audible buzz
of the smaller shells that are not easily distinguishable. They
must pick them out from the general din by their insect-like
hum—we explain to them that these are far more dangerous
than the big ones that can be heard long beforehand.

We show them how to take cover from aircraft, how to sim-
ulate a dead man when one is overrun in an attack, how to
time hand-grenades so that they explode half a second before
hitting the ground; we teach them to fling themselves into
holes as quick as lightning before the shells with instanta-
neous fuses; we show them how to clean up a trench with a
handful of bombs; we explain the difference between the fuse-
length of the enemy bombs and our own; we put them wise to
the sound of gas shells;—show them all the tricks that can
save them from death.

They listen, they are docile—but when it begins again, in
their excitement they do everything wrong.

Haie Westhus drags off with a great wound in his back
All Quiet on the Western Front 101

through which the lung pulses at every breath. I can only
press his hand; “It’s all up, Paul,” he groans and he bites his
arm because of the pain.

We see men living with their skulls blown open; we see
soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their
splintered stumps into the next shell-hole; a lance-corporal
crawls a mile and a half on his hands dragging his smashed
knee after him; another goes to the dressing station and over
his clasped hands bulge his intestines; we see men without
mouths, without jaws, without faces; we find one man who
has held the artery of his arm in his teeth for two hours in
order not to bleed to death. The sun goes down, night comes,
the shells whine, life is at an end.

Still the little piece of convulsed earth in which we lie is
held. We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it
as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead
man.

We have just been relieved. The wheels roll beneath us, we
stand dully, and when the call “Mind—wire” comes, we bend
our knees. It was summer when we came up, the trees were
still green, now it is autumn and the night is grey and wet.
The lorries stop, we climb out—a confused heap, a remnant of
many names. On either side stand people, dark, calling out
the numbers of the brigades, the battalions. And at each call a
little group separates itself off, a small handful of dirty, pallid
soldiers, a dreadfully small handful, and a dreadfully small
remnant.

Now someone is calling the number of our company, it is,
yes, the Company Commander, he has come through, then;
his arm is in a sling. We go over to him and I recognize Kat
102 Erich Maria Remarque

and Albert, we stand together, lean against each other, and
look at one another.

And we hear the number of our company called again and
again. He will call a long time, they do not hear him in the
hospitals and shell-holes.

Once again: “Second Company, this way!” And then more
softly: “Nobody else, Second Company?”

He is silent, and then huskily he says: “Is that all?” he gives
the order: “Number!”

The morning is grey, it was still summer when we came up,
and we were one hundred and fifty strong. Now we freeze, it
is autumn, the leaves rustle, the voices flutter out wearily:

 

“One—two—three—four ” and cease at thirty-two. And
there is a long silence before the voice asks: “Anyone else?”—

and waits and then says softly: “In squads ” and then

 

2»

breaks off and is only able to finish: “Second Company

 

with difficulty: “Second Company—march easy!”
A line, a short line trudges off into the morning.

Thirty-two men.
Seven

 

THEY HAVE TAKEN US farther back than usual to a field
depot so that we can be re-organized. Our company needs
more than a hundred reinforcements.

In the meantime, when we are off duty, we loaf around.
After a couple of days Himmelstoss comes up to us. He has
had the bounce knocked out of him since he has been in the
trenches and wants to get on good terms with us. I am will-
ing, because I saw how he brought Haie Westhus in when he
was hit in the back. Besides he’s decent enough to treat us in
the canteen when we are out of funds. Only Tjaden is still re-
served and suspicious.

But he is won over, too, when Himmelstoss tells us that he
is taking the place of the sergeant-cook who has gone on leave.
As a proof he produces spot two pounds of sugar for us and a
half-pound of butter specially for Tjaden. He even sees to it
that we are detailed the next two or three days to the cook-
house for potato and turnip peeling. The grub he gives us
there is real officers’ fare.

Thus momentarily we have the two things a soldier needs
104 Erich Maria Remarque

for contentment: good food and rest. That's not much when
one comes to think of it. A few years ago we would have de-
spised 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, to-day we act the fool
and go foraging through the countryside, to-morrow we go up
to the trenches again. We forget nothing really. But so long as
we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when
they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too griev-
ous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that,
we should have been destroyed long ago. I soon found out this
much:—terror can be endured so long as a man simply
ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

Just as we turn into animals when we go up to the line,
because that is the only thing which brings us through safely,
so we turn into wags and loafers when we are resting. We can
do nothing else, it is a sheer necessity. We want to live at any
price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which,
though they might be ornamental enough in peacetime,
would be out of place here. Kemmerich is dead, Haie Westhus
is dying, they will have a job with Hans Kramer’s body at the
Judgment Day, piecing it together after a direct hit; Martens
has no legs anymore, Meyer is dead, Max is dead, Beyer is
dead, Himmerling is dead, there are a hundred and twenty
wounded men lying somewhere or other; it is a damnable
business, but what has it to do with us now—we live. If it
were possible for us to save them, then it would be seen how
much we cared—we would have a shot at it though we went
under ourselves; for we can be damned quixotic when we like;
fear we do not know much about—terror of death, yes; but
that is a different matter, that is physical.
All Quiet on the Western Front 105

But our comrades are dead, we cannot help them, they have
their rest—and who knows what is waiting for us? We will
make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we
can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours
are not wasted. Life is short.

The terror of the front sinks deep down when we turn our
back upon it; we make grim, coarse jests about it, when a man
dies, then we say he has nipped off his turd, and so we speak
of everything; that keeps us from going mad; as long as we
take it that way we maintain our own resistance.

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 ar-
ranging 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.

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are
still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall
waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life
and death.

The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back
again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and
march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a pur-
pose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the
years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom?

Some time ago there was an army theatre in these parts.
Coloured posters of the performances are still sticking on a
106 Erich Maria Remarque

hoarding. With wide eyes Kropp and I stand in front of it. We
can hardly credit that such things still exist. A girl in a light
summer dress, with a red patent-leather belt about her hips!
She is standing with one hand on a railing and with the other
she holds a straw hat. She wears white stockings and white
shoes, fine buckle shoes with high heels. Behind her smiles the
blue sea with white-horses, at the side is a bright bay. She is a
lovely girl with a delicate nose, red lips, and slender legs,
wonderfully clean and well cared for, she certainly baths twice
a day and never has any dirt under her nails. At most perhaps
a bit of sand from the beach.

Beside her stands a man in white trousers, a blue jacket,
and sailor’s cap; but he interests us much less.

The girl on the poster is a wonder to us. We have quite
forgotten that there are such things, and even now we hardly
believe our eyes. We have seen nothing like it for years, noth-
ing like it for happiness, beauty and joy. That is peacetime,
that 1s as it should be; we feel excited.

“Just look at those thin shoes though, she couldn’t march
many miles in those,” I say, and then begin to feel silly, for it
is absurd to stand in front of the picture like this and think of
nothing but marching.

“How old would she be?” Kropp asks.

“About twenty-two at the most,” I hazard.

“Then she would be older than us! She is not more than
seventeen, let me tell you!”

It gives us goose flesh.

“That would be good, Albert, what do you think?”

He nods. “I have some white trousers at home too.”

”»

 

“White trousers,” say I, “but a girl like that
We look askance at one another. There's not much to boast
All Quiet on the Western Front 107

of here—two ragged, stained, and dirty uniforms. It is hope-
less to compete.

So we proceed to tear the young man with the white trou-
sers off the hoarding, taking care not to damage the girl. That
is something toward it.

“We could go and get deloused, anyway,” Kropp then sug-
gests.

I am not very enthusiastic because it doesn’t do one’s clothes
any good and a man is lousy again inside two hours. But when
we have considered the picture once more, I declare myself
willing. I go even farther.

”»

“We might see if we could get a clean shirt as well

 

“Socks might be better,” says Albert, not without reason.

“Yes, socks too perhaps. Let’s go and explore a bit.”

Then Leer and Tjaden stroll up; they look at the poster and
immediately the conversation becomes smutty. Leer was the
first of our class to have intercourse, and he gave stirring de-
tails of it. After his fashion he enjoys himself over the picture,
and Tjaden supports him nobly.

It does not distress us exactly. Who isn’t smutty is no sol-
dier; it merely does not suit us at the moment, so we edge
away and march off to the delousing station with the same
feeling as if it were a swell gentlemen’s outfitters.

The houses in which we are billeted lie near the canal. On the
other side of the canal there are ponds flanked with poplars;—on
the other side of the canal there are women too.

The houses on our side have been abandoned. On the other
side though one occasionally sees inhabitants.

In the evening we go swimming. Three women come stroll-
108 Erich Maria Remarque

ing along the bank. They walk slowly and don’t look away,
although we have no bathing suits.

Leer calls out to them. They laugh and stop to watch us.
We fling remarks at them in broken French, anything that
comes into our heads, hastily and all jumbled together, any-
thing to detain them. They are not specially wonderful pieces,
but then where are such to be had about here?

There is one slim little brunette, her teeth gleam when she
laughs. She has quick movements, her dress swings loosely
about her legs. Although the water is cold we are very jovial
and do our best to interest them so that they will stay. We try
to make jokes and they answer with things we cannot under-
stand; we laugh and beckon. Tjaden is more crafty. He runs
into the house, gets a loaf of army bread and holds it up.

That produces a great effect. They nod and beckon us to
come over. But we don’t dare to do that. It is forbidden to
cross to the opposite bank. There are sentries on all the bridges.
It’s impossible without a pass. So we indicate that they should
come over to us; but they shake their heads and point to the
bridge. They are not allowed to pass either. They turn back
and walk slowly down the canal, keeping along the towpath
all the way. We accompany them swimming. After a few hun-
dred yards they turn off and point to a house that stands a
little distance away among the trees and shrubbery.

Leer asks if they live there.

They laugh—sure, that’s their house.

We call out to them that we would like to come, sometime
when the guards cannot see us. At night. To-night.

They raise their hands, put them together, rest their faces
on them and shut their eyes. They understand. The slim bru-
nette does a two-step. The blonde girl twitters: “Bread—

»

 

good
All Quiet on the Western Front 109

Eagerly we assure them that we will bring some with us.
And other tasty bits too, we roll our eyes and try to explain
with our hands. Leer nearly drowns trying to demonstrate a
sausage. If it were necessary we would promise them a whole
quartermaster’s store. They go off and frequently turn and
look back. We climb out on the bank on our side of the canal
and watch to see whether they go into the house, for they
might easily have been lying. Then we swim back.

No one can cross the bridge without leave, so we will sim-
ply have to swim over to-night. We are full of excitement. We
cannot last out without a drink, so we go to the canteen where
there is beer and a kind of punch.

We drink punch and tell one another lying tales of our ex-
periences. Each man gladly believes the other man’s story,
only waiting impatiently till he can cap it with a taller one.
Our hands are fidgety, we smoke countless cigarettes, until
Kropp says: “We might as well take them a few cigarettes
too.” So we put some inside our caps to keep them.

The sky turns apple-green. There are four of us, but only
three can go; we must shake off Tjaden, so ply him with rum
and punch until he rocks. As it turns dark we go to our billets,
Tjaden in the centre. We are glowing and full of a lust for
adventure.

The little brunette is mine, we have settled all that.

Tjaden drops on his sack of straw and snores. Once he wakes
up and grins so craftily that we are alarmed and begin to think
he is cheating, and that we have given him the punch to no
purpose. Then he drops back again and sleeps on.

We each get hold of a whole army loaf and wrap it up in
newspaper. The cigarettes we put in too, as well as three good
rations of liver-sausage that were issued to us this evening.
That makes a decent present.
110 Erich Maria Remarque

We stow the things carefully in our boots; we have to take
them to protect our feet against treading on wire and broken
glass on the other bank. As we must swim for it we can take
no other clothes. But it is not far and quite dark.

We make off with our boots in our hands. Swiftly we slip
into the water, lie on our backs and swim, holding the boots
with their contents up over our heads.

We climb out carefully on the opposite bank, take out the
packages and put on our boots. We put the things under our
arms. And so, all wet and naked, clothed only in our boots, we
break into a trot. We find the house at once. It lies among the
trees. Leer trips over a root and skins his elbows.

“No matter,” he says gaily.

The windows are shuttered. We slip round the house and
try to peer through the cracks. Then we grow impatient. Sud-
denly Kropp hesitates:

“What if there's a Major with them?”

“Then we just clear off,” grins Leer, “he can try to read our
regimental numbers here,” and smacks his behind.

The door of the courtyard stands open. Our boots made a
great clatter. The house door opens, a chink of light shines
through and a woman cries out in a scared voice.

>

“Ssh, ssh! camerade—bon ami—" we say, and show our
packages protestingly.

The other two are now on the scene, the door opens and the
light floods over us. They recognize us and all three burst into
laughter at our appearance. They rock and sway in the door-
way, they laugh so much. How supple their movements are.

“Un moment—" They disappear and throw us bits of cloth-
ing which we gladly wrap round ourselves. Then we are al-
lowed in. A small lamp burns in their room, which is warm

and smells a little of perfume. We unwrap our parcels and
All Quiet on the Western Front I11

hand them over to the women. Their eyes shine, it is obvious
that they are hungry.

Then we all become rather embarrassed. Leer makes the
gestures of eating, and then they come to life again and bring
out plates and knives and fall to on the food, and they hold up
every slice of livered sausage and admire it before they eat it,
and we sit proudly by.

They overwhelm us with their chatter;—we understand
very little of it, but we listen and the words sound friendly.
No doubt we all look very young. The little brunette strokes
my hair and says what all French women say: “La guerre—

”»

grand malheur—pauvres garcons

 

I hold her arm tightly and press my lips into the palm of
her hand. Her fingers close round my face. Close above me are
her bewildering eyes, the soft brown of her skin and her red
lips. Her mouth speaks words I do not understand. Nor do I
fully understand her eyes; they seem to say more than we an-
ticipated when we came here.

There are other rooms adjoining. In passing I see Leer, he
has made a great hit with the blonde. He's an old hand at the
game. But I—I am lost in remoteness, in weakness, and in a
passion to which I yield myself trustingly. My desires are
strangely compounded of yearning and misery. I feel giddy,
there is nothing here that a man can hold on to. We have left
our boots at the door, they have given us slippers instead, and
now nothing remains to recall for me the assurance and self-
confidence of the soldier; no rifle, no belt, no tunic, no cap. I
let myself drop into the unknown, come what may—yet, in
spite of all, I feel somewhat afraid.

The little brunette contracts her brows when she is think-
ing; but when she talks they are still. And often sound does

not quite become a word but suffocates or floats away over me
112 Erich Maria Remarque

half finished; an arch, a pathway, a comet. What have I known
of it—what do I know of it?—The words of this foreign
tongue, that I hardly understand, they caress me to a quiet-
ness, in which the room grows dim, and dissolves in the half
light, only the face above me lives and is clear.

How various is a face; but an hour ago it was strange and it
is now touched with a tenderness that comes, not from it, but
from out of the night, the world and the blood, all these things
seem to shine in it together. The objects in the room are
touched by it and transformed, they become isolated, and I
feel almost awed at the sight of my clear skin when the light
of the lamp falls upon it and the cool, brown hand passes
over it.

How different this is from the conditions in the soldiers’
brothels, to which we are allowed to go, and where we have to
wait in long queues. I wish I never thought of them; but de-
sire turns my mind to them involuntarily and I am afraid for
it might be impossible ever to be free of them again.

But then I feel the lips of the little brunette and press my-
self against them, my eyes close, and I want it all to fall from
me, war and terror and grossness, in order to awaken young
and happy; I think of the picture of the girl on the poster and,
for a moment, believe that my life depends on winning her.
And if I press ever deeper into the arms that embrace me, per-

haps a miracle may happen. . . .

So, after a time we find ourselves reassembled again. Leer is in
high spirits. We pull on our boots and take our leave warmly.
The night air cools our hot bodies. The rustling poplars loom
large in the darkness. The moon floats in the heavens and in
All Quiet on the Western Front i

the waters of the canal. We do not run, we walk beside one
another with long strides.

“That was worth a ration-loaf,” says Leer.

I cannot trust myself to speak, I am not in the least happy.

Then we hear footsteps and dodge behind a shrub.

The steps come nearer, close by us. We see a naked soldier,
in boots, just like ourselves; he has a package under his arm,
and gallops onward. It is Tjaden in full course. He has disap-
peared already.

We laugh. In the morning he will curse us.

Unobserved, we arrive again at our sacks of straw.

I am called to the Orderly Room. The Company Commander
gives me a leave-pass and a travel-pass and wishes me a good
journey. I look to see how much leave I have got. Seventeen
days—fourteen days leave and three days for travelling. It is
not enough and I ask whether I cannot have five days for trav-
elling. Bertinck points to my pass. There I see that I am not
to return to the front immediately. After my leave I have to
report for a course of training to a camp on the moors.

The others envy me. Kat gives me good advice, and tells me
I ought to try to get a base-job. “If you're smart, you'll hang
on to it.”

I would rather not have gone for another eight days; we are
to stay here that much longer and it is good here.

Naturally I have to stand the others drinks at the canteen.
We are all a little bit drunk. I become gloomy: I will be away
for six weeks—that is lucky, of course, but what may happen
before I get back? Shall I meet all these fellows again? Already
Haie and Kemmerich have gone—who will the next be?
114 Erich Maria Remarque

As we drink, I look at each of them in turn. Albert sits be-
side me and smokes, he is cheerful, we have always been
together;—opposite squats Kat, with his drooping shoulders,
his broad thumb, and calm voice—Miiller with the projecting
teeth and the booming laugh; Tjaden with his mousey eyes;—
Leer who has grown a full beard and looks at least forty.

Over us hangs a dense cloud of smoke. Where would a sol-
dier be without tobacco? The canteen is his refuge, and beer is
far more than a drink, it is a token that a man can move his
limbs and stretch in safety. We do it ceremonially, we stretch
our legs out in front of us and spit deliberately, that is the only
way. How it all rises up before a man when he is going away
the next morning!

At night we go again to the other side of the canal. I am
almost afraid to tell the little brunette that I am going away,
and when I return we will be far from here; we will never see
one another again. But she merely nods and takes no special
notice. At first I am at a loss to understand, then it suddenly
dawns on me. Yes, Leer is right: if I were going up to the
front, then she would have called me again “pauvre garcon”;
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 de-loused, I go 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
other two have to go back to duty. We take leave of one an-
other.

“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 recognize
All Quiet on the Western Front I15

them at any distance. Then they disappear. I sit down on my
pack and wait.

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to
be gone.

I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a
soup-kitchen; I squat on many a bench;—then at last the
landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It
glides past the western windows with its villages, their
thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-
timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-
pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime
trees.

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, farm-yards; a solitary team moves
against the sky-line 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.

It is evening, and if the train did not rattle I should cry out.
The plain unfolds itself.

In the distance, the soft, blue silhouette of the mountain
ranges begins to appear. I recognize the characteristic outline
of the Dolbenberg, a jagged comb, springing up precipitously
from the limits of the forests. Behind it should lie the town.

But now the sun streams through the world, dissolving ev-
erything in its golden-red light, the train swings round one

curve and then another;—far away, in a long line one behind
116 Erich Maria Remarque

the other, stand the poplars, unsubstantial, swaying and dark,
fashioned out of shadow, light, and desire.

The field swings round as the train encircles it, and the in-
tervals between the trees diminish; the trees become a block
and for a moment I see one only—then they reappear from
behind the foremost tree and stand out a long line against the
sky until they are hidden by the first houses.

A street-crossing. I stand by the window, I cannot drag my-
self away. The others put their baggage ready for getting out.
I repeat to myself the name of the street that we cross over—
Bremerstrasse—Bremerstrasse—

Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and
a grey subway;—it affects me as though it were my mother.

Then the train stops, and there is the station with noise and
cries and signboards. I pick up my pack and fasten the straps,
I take my rifle in my hand and stumble down the steps.

On the platform I look round; I know no one among all the
people hurrying to and fro. A red-cross sister offers me some-
thing to drink. I turn away, she smiles at me too foolishly, so
obsessed with her own importance: “Just look, I am giving a
soldier coffee!”—She calls me “Comrade,” but I will have
none of it.

Outside in front of the station the stream roars alongside
the street, it rushes foaming from the sluices of the mill
bridge. There stands the old, square watch-tower, in front of
it the great mottled lime tree and behind it the evening.

Here we have often sat—how long ago it is—we have
passed over this bridge and breathed the cool, acid smell of
the stagnant water; we have leaned over the still water on this
side of the lock, where the green creepers and weeds hang
from the piles of the bridge;—and on hot days we rejoiced in
All Quiet on the Western Front 117

the spouting foam on the other side of the lock and told tales
about our school-teachers.

I pass over the bridge, I look right and left; the water is as
full of weeds as ever, and it still shoots over in gleaming arches;
in the tower building laundresses still stand with bare arms as
they used to over the clean linen, and the heat from the iron-
ing pours out through the open windows. Dogs trot along the
narrow street, before the doors of the houses people stand and
follow me with their gaze as I pass by, dirty and heavy laden.

In this confectioner’s we used to eat ices, and there we
learned to smoke cigarettes. Walking down the street I know
every shop, the grocer’s, the chemist’s, the baker’s. Then at last
I stand before the brown door with its worn latch and my
hand grows heavy. I open the door and a strange coolness
comes out to meet me, my eyes are dim.

The stairs creak under my boots. Upstairs a door rattles,
someone is looking over the railing. It is the kitchen door that
was opened, they are cooking potato-cakes, the house reeks of
it, and to-day of course is Saturday; that will be my sister lean-
ing over. For a moment I am shy and lower my head, then I
take off my helmet and look up. Yes, it is my eldest sister.

”»

 

“Paul,” she cries, “Paul

I nod, my pack bumps against the banisters; my rifle is so
heavy.

She pulls a door open and calls: “Mother, mother, Paul is
here.”

I can go no further—mother, mother, Paul is here.

I lean against the wall and grip my helmet and rifle. I hold
them as tight as I can, but I cannot take another step, the
staircase fades before my eyes, I support myself with the butt
of my rifle against my feet and clench my teeth fiercely, but I
118 Erich Maria Remarque

cannot speak a word, my sister’s call has made me powerless, I
can do nothing, I struggle to make myself laugh, to speak, but
no word comes, and so I stand on the steps, miserable, help-
less, paralysed, and against my will the tears run down my
cheeks.

My sister comes back and says: “Why, what is the matter?”

Then I pull myself together and stagger on to the landing.
I lean my rifle in a corner, I set my pack against the wall, place
my helmet on it and fling down my equipment and baggage.
Then I say fiercely: “Bring me a handkerchief.”

She gives me one from the cupboard and I dry my face.
Above me on the wall hangs the glass case with the coloured
butterflies that once I collected.

Now I hear my mother’s voice. It comes from the bedroom.

“Is she in bed?” I ask my sister.

“She is ill

I go into her, give her my hand and say as calmly as I can:
“Here I am, Mother.”

 

” she replies.

She lies still in the dim light. Then she asks anxiously:

“Are you wounded?” and I feel her searching glance.

“No, I have got leave.”

My mother is very pale. I am afraid to make a light.

“Here I lie now,” says she, “and cry instead of being glad.”

“Are you sick, Mother?” I ask.

“I am going to get up a little to-day,” she says and turns to
my sister, who is continually running to the kitchen to watch
that the food does not burn: “And put out that jar of preserved
whortleberries—you like that, don’t you?” she asks me.

“Yes, Mother, I haven't had any for a long time.”

“We might almost have known you were coming,” laughs
my sister, “there is just your favourite dish, potato-cakes, and

even whortleberries to go with them too.”
All Quiet on the Western Front 119

“And it is Saturday,” I add.

“Sit here beside me,” says my mother.

She looks at me. Her hands are white and sickly and frail
compared with mine. We say very little and I am thankful
that she asks nothing. What ought I to say? Everything I
could have wished for has happened. I have come out of it
safely and sit here beside her. And in the kitchen stands my
sister preparing supper and singing.

“Dear boy,” says my mother softly.

We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk
who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to
protest what they already know. When my mother says to me
“dear boy,” it means much more than when another uses it. I
know well enough that the jar of whortleberries is the only
one they have had for months, and that she has kept it for me;
and the somewhat stale cakes that she gives me too. She must
have got them cheap some time and put them all by for me.

I sit by her bed, and through the window the chestnut trees
in the beer garden opposite glow in brown and gold. I breathe
deeply and say over to myself:— “You are at home, you are at
home.” But a sense of strangeness will not leave me, I cannot
feel at home amongst these things. There is my mother, there
is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the ma-
hogany piano—but I am not myself there. There is a distance,
a veil between us.

I go and fetch my pack to the bedside and turn out the
things I have brought—a whole Edamer cheese, that Kat pro-
vided me with, two loaves of army bread, three-quarters of a
pound of butter, two tins of livered sausage, a pound of drip-
ping and a little bag of rice.

”»

“I suppose you can make some use of that

They nod.

 
120 Erich Maria Remarque

“It is pretty bad for food here?” I enquire.

“Yes, there's not much. Do you get enough out there?”

I smile and point to the things I have brought. “Not always
quite as much as that, of course, but we fare reasonably well.”

Erna takes away the food. Suddenly my mother seizes hold
of my hand and asks falteringly: “Was it very bad out there,
Paul?”

Mother, what should I answer to that! You would not un-
derstand, you could never realize it. And you shall never real-
ize it. Was it bad, you ask.—You, Mother,—1I shake my head
and say: “No, Mother, not so very. There are always a lot of us
together so it isn’t so bad.”

“Yes, but Heinrich Bredemeyer was here just lately and
said it was terrible out there now, with the gas and all the rest
of it.”

It is my mother who says that. She says: “With the gas and
all the rest of it.” She does not know what she is saying, she is
merely anxious for me. Should I tell her how we once found
three enemy trenches with their garrison all stiff as though
stricken with apoplexy? against the parapet, in the dug-outs,
just where they were, the men stood and lay about, with blue
faces, dead.

“No Mother, that’s only talk,” I answer, “there’s not very
much in what Bredemeyer says. You see for instance, I'm well
and fit r

Before my mother’s tremulous anxiety I recover my compo-

 

sure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions
without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall be-
cause the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become
brimstone.

My mother wants to get up. So I go for a while to my sister
in the kitchen. “What is the matter with her?” I ask.
All Quiet on the Western Front 121

She shrugs her shoulders: “She has been in bed some months
now, but we did not want to write and tell you. Several doc-
tors have been to see her. One of them said it is probably can-

cer again.”

I go to the district commandant to report myself. Slowly I
wander through the streets. Occasionally someone speaks to
me. I do not delay long for I have little inclination to talk.

On the way back from the barracks a loud voice calls out to
me. Still lost in thought I turn round and find myself con-
fronted by a Major. “Can’t you salute?” he blusters.

“Sorry, Major,” I say in embarrassment, “I didn’t notice
you.”

“Don’t you know how to speak properly?” he roars.

I would like to hit him in the face, but control myself, for
my leave depends on it. I click my heels and say: “I did not see
you, Herr Major.”

“Then keep your eyes open,” he snorts. “What is your
name?” I give it.

His fat red face is furious. “What regiment?”

I give him full particulars. Even yet he has not had enough.
“Where are you quartered?”

But I have had more than enough and say: “Between Lange-
mark and Bixschoote.”

“Eh?” he asks, a bit stupefied.

I explain to him that I arrived on leave only an hour or two
since, thinking that he would then trot along. But not at all.
He gets even more furious: “You think you can bring your
front-line manners here, what? Well, we don’t stand for that
sort of thing. Thank God, we have discipline here!”

“Twenty paces backwards, double march!” he commands.
122 Erich Maria Remarque

I am mad with rage. But I cannot say anything to him; he
could put me under arrest if he liked. So I double back, and
then march up to him. Six paces from him I spring to a stiff
salute and maintain it until I am six paces beyond him.

He calls me back again and affably gives me to understand
that for once he is pleased to put mercy before justice. I pre-
tend to be duly grateful. “Now, dismiss!” he says. I turn about
smartly and march off.

That ruins the evening for me. I go back home and throw
my uniform into a corner; I had intended to change it in any
case. Then I take out my civilian clothes from the wardrobe
and put them on.

I feel awkward. The suit is rather tight and short, I have
grown in the army. Collar and tie give me some trouble. In the
end my sister ties the bow for me. But how light the suit is, it
feels as though I had nothing on but a shirt and underpants.

I look at myself in the glass. It is a strange sight. A sun-
burnt, overgrown candidate for confirmation gazes at me in
astonishment.

My mother is pleased to see me wearing civilian clothes; it
makes me less strange to her. But my father would rather I
kept my uniform on so that he could take me to visit his ac-
quaintances.

But I refuse.

It is pleasant to sit quietly somewhere, in the beer garden for
example, under the chestnuts by the skittle-alley. The leaves
fall down on the table and on the ground, only a few, the first.
A glass of beer stands in front of me, I've learned to drink in
the army. The glass is half empty, but there are a few good
All Quiet on the Western Front 123

swigs ahead of me, and besides I can always order a second and
a third if I wish to. There are no bugles and no bombard-
ments, the children of the house play in the skittle-alley, and
the dog rests his head against my knee. The sky is blue, be-
tween the leaves of the chestnuts rises the green spire of St.
Margaret's Church.

This is good, I like it. But I cannot get on with the people.
My mother is the only one who asks no questions. Not so my
father. He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious
in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have
any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more
than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a
man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it
is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am
afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer
able to master them. What would become of us if everything
that happens out there were quite clear to us?

So I confine myself to telling him a few amusing things.
But he wants to know whether I have ever had a hand-to-hand
fight. I say “No,” and get up and go out.

But that does not mend matters. After I have been startled
a couple of times in the street by the screaming of the tram-
cars, which resembles the shriek of a shell coming straight for
one, somebody taps me on the shoulder. It is my German-
master, and he fastens on me with the usual question: “Well,
how are things out there? Terrible, terrible, eh? Yes, it is
dreadful, but we must carry on. And after all, you do at least
get decent food out there, so. I hear. You look well, Paul, and
fit. Naturally it’s worse here. Naturally. The best for our sol-
diers every time, that goes without saying.”

He drags me along to a table with a lot of others. They
124 Erich Maria Remarque

welcome me, a head-master shakes hands with me and says:
“So you come from the front? What is the spirit like out there?
Excellent, eh? Excellent?”

I explain that no one would be sorry to be back home.

He laughs uproariously. “I can well believe it! But first you
have to give the Froggies a good hiding. Do you smoke? Here,
try one. Waiter, bring a beer as well for our young warrior.”

Unfortunately I have accepted the cigar, so I have to re-
main. And they are all so dripping with good will that it is
impossible to object. All the same I feel annoyed and smoke
like a chimney as hard as I can. In order to make at least some
show of appreciation I toss off the beer in one gulp. Immedi-
ately a second is ordered; people know how much they are
indebted to the soldiers. They argue about what we ought to
annex. The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to
have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France,
and a slice of Russia. He produces reasons why we must have
them and is quite inflexible until at last the others give in to
him. Then he begins to expound just where-abouts in France
the break-through must come, and turns to me: “Now, shove
ahead a bit out there with your everlasting trench warfare—
Smash through the johnnies and then there will be peace.”

I reply that in our opinion a break-through may not be pos-
sible. The enemy may have too many reserves. Besides, the
war may be rather different from what people think.

He dismisses the idea loftily and informs me I know noth-
ing about it. “The details, yes,” says he, “but this relates to the
whole. And of that you are not able to judge. You see only
your little sector and so cannot have any general survey. You
do your duty, you risk your lives, that deserves the highest
honour—every man of you ought to have the Iron Cross—but
All Quiet on the Western Front 125

first of all the enemy line must be broken through in Flanders
and then rolled up from the top.”

He blows his nose and wipes his beard. “Completely rolled
up they must be, from the top to the bottom. And then to
Paris.”

I would like to know just how he pictures it to himself, and
pour the third glass of beer into me. Immediately he orders
another.

But I break away. He stuffs a few more cigars into my
pocket and sends me off with a friendly slap. “All of the best!
I hope we will soon hear something worth while from you.”

I imagined leave would be different from this. Indeed, it was
different a year ago. It is I of course that have changed in the
interval. There lies a gulf between that time and to-day. At
that time I still knew nothing about the war, we had only
been in quiet sectors. But now I see that I have been crushed
without knowing it. I find I do not belong here any more, it is
a foreign world. Some of these people ask questions, some ask
no questions, but one can see that the latter are proud of them-
selves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these
things cannot be talked about. They plume themselves on it.

I prefer to be alone, so that no one troubles me. For they all
come back to the same thing, how badly it goes and how well
it goes; one thinks it is this way, another that; and yet they are
always absorbed in the things that go to make up their exis-
tence. Formerly I lived in just the same way myself, but now
I feel no contact here.

They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, de-
sires, that I cannot comprehend. I often sit with one of them
126 Erich Maria Remarque

in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is
really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They under-
stand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but
only with words, only with words, yes that is it—they feel it,
but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being
is taken up with other things, they are so divided in them-
selves that none feels it with his whole essence; I cannot even
say myself exactly what I mean.

When I see them here, in their rooms, in their offices, about
their occupations, I feel an irresistible attraction in it, I would
like to be here too and forget the war; but also it repels me, it
is so narrow, how can that fill a man’s life, he ought to smash
it to bits; how can they do it, while out at the front the splin-
ters are whining over the shell-holes and star-shells go up, the
wounded are carried back on waterproof sheets and comrades
crouch in the trenches.—They are different men here, men I
cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise. I must
think of Kat and Albert and Miiller and Tjaden, what will
they be doing? No doubt they are sitting in the canteen, or
perhaps swimming—soon they will have to go up to the

front-line again.

In my room behind the table stands a brown leather sofa. I sit
down on it.

On the walls are pinned countless pictures that I once used
to cut out of the newspapers. In between are drawings and
postcards that have pleased me. In the corner is a small iron
stove. Against the wall opposite stand the book-shelves with
my books.

I used to live in this room before I was a soldier. The books
I bought gradually with the money I earned by coaching.
All Quiet on the Western Front 127

Many of them are secondhand, all the classics for example, one
volume in blue cloth boards cost one mark twenty pfenning. I
bought them complete because it was thorough-going, I did
not trust the editors of selections to choose all the best. So I
purchased only “collected works.” I read most of them with
laudable zeal, but few of them really appealed to me. I pre-
ferred the other books, the moderns, which were of course
much dearer. A few I came by not quite honestly, I borrowed
and did not return them because I did not want to part with
them.

One shelf is filled with school books. They are not so well
cared for, they are badly thumbed, and pages have been torn
out for certain purposes. Then below are periodicals, papers,
and letters all jammed in together with drawings and rough
sketches.

I want to think myself back into that time. It is still in the
room, I feel it at once, the walls have preserved it. My hands
rest on the arms of the sofa; now I make myself at home and
draw up my legs so that I sit comfortably in the corner, in the
arms of the sofa. The little window is open, through it I see
the familiar picture of the street with the rising spire of the
church at the end. There are a couple of flowers on the table.
Pen-holders, a shell as a paper-weight, the ink-well—here
nothing is changed.

It will be like this too. If I am lucky, when the war is over
and I come back here for good. I will sit here just like this and
look at my room and wait.

I feel excited; but I do not want to be, for that is not right.
I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same power-
ful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my
books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured
backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead
128 Erich Maria Remarque

lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the
impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought,
it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit
and wait.

It occurs to me that I must go and see Kemmerich’s
mother;—I might visit Mittelstaedt too, he should be at the
barracks. I look out of the window;—Dbeyond the picture of
the sunlit street appears a range of hills, distant and light; it
changes to a clear day in autumn, and I sit by the fire with Kat
and Albert and eat potatoes baked in their skins.

But I do not want to think of that, I sweep it away. The
room shall speak, it must catch me up and hold me, I want to
feel that I belong here, I want to hearken and know when I go
back to the front that the war will sink down, he drowned ut-
terly in the great home-coming tide, know that it will then be
past forever, and not gnaw us continually, that it will have
none but an outward power over us.

The backs of the books stand in rows. I know them all still,
I remember arranging them in order. I implore them with my
eyes: Speak to me—take me up—take me, Life of my Youth—
you who are care-free, beautiful—receive me again—

I wait, I wait.

Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me,
they are mere shadows and memories.

Nothing—nothing—

My disquietude grows.

A terrible feeling of foreignness suddenly rises up in me. I
cannot find my way back, I am shut out though I entreat ear-
nestly and put forth all my strength.

Nothing stirs; listless and wretched, like a condemned
man, I sit there and the past withdraws itself. And at the same
All Quiet on the Western Front 129

time I fear to importune it too much, because I do not know
what might happen then. I am a soldier, I must cling to that.

Wearily I stand up and look out of the window. Then I take
one of the books, intending to read, and turn over the leaves.
But I put it away and take out another. There are passages in
it that have been marked. I look, turn over the pages, take up
fresh books. Already they are piled up beside me. Speedily
more join the heap, papers, magazines, letters.

I stand there dumb. As before a judge.

Dejected.

Words, Words, Words—they do not reach me.

Slowly I place the books back in the shelves.

Nevermore.

Quietly, I go out of the room.

I still do not give up hope. I do not indeed go to my room any
more, but comfort myself with the thought that a few days are
not enough to judge by. Afterwards—Ilater on—there is plenty
of time for that.

So I go over to see Mittelstaedt in the barracks, and we sit
in his room; there is an atmosphere about it that I do not like
but with which I am quite familiar.

Mittelstaedt has some news ready for me that electrifies me
on the spot. He tells me Kantorek has been called up as a ter-
ritorial.

“Just think of it,” says he, and takes out a couple of good
cigars, “I come back here from the hospital and bump right
into him. He stretches out his paw to me and bleats: ‘Hullo
Mittelstaedt, how are you?’ —1I look at him and say: “Territo-
rial Kantorek, business is business and schnapps is schnapps,
130 Erich Maria Remarque

you ought to know that well enough. Stand to attention when
you speak to a superior officer.” You should have seen his face!
A cross between a dud and a pickled cucumber. He tried once
again to chum up. So I snubbed him a bit harder. Then he
brought up his biggest guns and asked confidentially: “Would
you like me to use my influence so that you can take an
emergency-exam?’ He was trying to remind me of those
things, you know. Then I got mad, and I reminded him of
something instead. “Territorial Kantorek, two years ago you
preached us into enlisting; and among us there was one, Jo-
seph Behm, who didn’t want to enlist. He was killed three
months before he would have been called up in the ordinary
way. If it had not been for you he would have lived just that
much longer. And now: Dismiss. You will hear from me later.’
It was easy to get put in charge of his company. First thing I
did was to take him to the stores and fit him out with suitable
equipment. You will see in a minute.”

We go to the parade ground. The company has fallen in,
Mittelstaedt stands them at ease and inspects.

Then I see Kantorek and am scarcely able to stifle my
laughter. He is wearing a faded blue tunic. On the back and in
the sleeves there are big dark patches. The tunic must have
belonged to a giant. The black, worn breeches are just as much
too short; they reach barely halfway down his calf. The boots,
tough old clod-hoppers, with turned-up toes and laces at the
side are much too big for him. But as a compensation the cap
is too small, a terribly dirty, mean little pill-box. The whole
rig-out is just pitiful.

Mittelstaedt stops in front of him: “Territorial Kantorek,
do you call those buttons polished? You seem as though you

 

can never learn. Inadequate, Kantorek, quite inadequate
It makes me bubble with glee. In school Kantorek used to
All Quiet on the Western Front 131

chasten Mittelstaedt with exactly the same expression—
“Inadequate, Mittelstaedt, quite inadequate.”

Mittelstaedt continues to upbraid him: “Look at Boettcher
now, there’s a model for you to learn from.”

I can hardly believe my eyes. Boettcher is there too,
Boettcher, our school porter. And he is a model! Kantorek
shoots a glance at me as if he would like to eat me. But I grin
at him innocently, as though I do not recognize him any more.

Nothing could look more ludicrous than his forage-cap and
his uniform. And this is the object before whom we used to
stand in anguish as he sat up there enthroned at his desk,
spearing at us with his pencil for our mistakes in those irregu-
lar French verbs with which afterwards we made so little
headway in France. That is barely two years ago—and now
here stands Territorial Kantorek, the spell quite broken, with
bent knees, arms like pothooks, unpolished buttons and that
ludicrous rig-out—an impossible soldier. I cannot reconcile
this with the menacing figure at the schoolmaster’s desk. I
wonder what I, the old soldier, would do if this skinful of woe
ever dared to say to me again: “Baumer, give the imperfect of
‘aller.””

Then Mittelstaedt makes them practise skirmishing, and as
a favour appoints Kantorek squad leader.

Now, in skirmishing the squad leader has always to keep
twenty paces in front of his squad; if the order comes “On the
march, about turn,” the line of skirmishers simply turns
about, but the squad leader, who now finds himself suddenly
twenty paces in the rear of the line, has to rush up at the
double and take his position again twenty paces in front of the
squad. That makes altogether forty paces double march. But
no sooner has he arrived than the order “On the march, about

turn,” comes again and he once more has to race at top speed
132 Erich Maria Remarque

another forty paces to the other side. In this way the squad has
merely made the turn-about and a couple of paces, while the
squad-leader dashes backwards and forwards like a fart on a
curtain-pole. That is one of Himmelstoss’ well-worn recipes.

Kantorek can hardly expect anything else from Mittel-
staedt, for he once messed up the latter's chance of promotion,
and Mittelstaedt would be a big fool not to make the best of
such a good opportunity as this before he goes back to the
front again. A man might well die easier after the army has
given him just one such stroke of luck.

In the meantime Kantorek is dashing up and down like a
wild boar. After a while Mittelstaedt stops the skirmish and
begins the very important exercise of creeping.

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 quo-
tations from Kantorek the school-master. “Territorial Kan-
torek, we have the good fortune to live in a great age, we must
brace ourselves and triumph over hardship.”

Kantorek sweats and spits out a dirty piece of wood that has
lodged in his teeth.

Mittelstaedt stoops down and says reproachfully: “And in
the trifles never lose sight of the great adventure, Territorial
Kantorek!”

It amazes me that Kantorek does not explode with a bang,
especially when, during physical exercises, Mittelstaedt copies
him to perfection, seizing him by the seat of his trousers as he
is pulling himself up on the horizontal bar so that he can just
raise his chin above the beam, and then starts to give him
good advice. That is exactly what Kantorek used to do to him

at school.
All Quiet on the Western Front 133

The extra fatigues are next detailed off. “Kantorek and
Boettcher, bread fatigue! Take the handcart with you.”

A few minutes later the two set off together pushing the
barrow. Kantorek in a fury walks with his head down. But the
porter is delighted to have scored light duty.

The bakehouse is away at the other end of the town, and the
two must go there and back through the whole length of it.

“They've done that a couple of times already,” grins Mit-
telstaedt. “People have begun to watch for them coming.”

“Excellent,” I say, “but hasn't he reported you yet?”

“He did try. Our C.O. laughed like the deuce when he
heard the story. He hasn’t any time for schoolmasters. Besides,
I'm sweet with his daughter.”

“He'll mess up the examination for you.”

“I don’t care,” says Mittelstaedt calmly. “Besides, his com-
plaint came to nothing because I could show that he had had
hardly anything but light duty.”

“Couldn’t you polish him up a bit?” I ask.

“He’s too stupid, I couldn’t be bothered,” answers Mittel-
staedt contemptuously.

What is leave?’—A pause that only makes everything after it
so much worse. Already the sense of parting begins to intrude
itself. My mother watches me silently; I know she counts the
days; every morning she is sad. It is one day less. She has put
away my pack, she does not want to be reminded by it.

The hours pass quickly if a man broods. I pull myself to-
gether, and go with my sister to the slaughter-house to get a
pound or two of bones. That is a great favour and people line
up early in the morning and stand waiting. Many of them
faint.
134 Erich Maria Remarque

We have no luck. After waiting by turns for three hours the
queue disperses. The bones have not lasted out.

It is a good thing that I get my rations. I bring them to my
mother and in that way we all get something decent to eat.

The days grow ever more strained and my mother’s eyes
more sorrowful. Four days left now. I must go and see Kem-

merich’s mother.

I cannot write that down. This quaking, sobbing woman who
shakes me and cries out on me: “Why are you living then,
when he is dead?”—who drowns me in tears and calls out:

 

“What are you there for at all, child, when you ’—who
drops into a chair and wails: “Did you see him? Did you see
him then? How did he die?”

I tell her he was shot through the heart and died instanta-
neously. She looks at me, she doubts me: “You lie. I know
better. I have felt how terribly he died. I have heard his voice
at night, I have felt his anguish—tell the truth, I want to
know it, I must know it.”

“No,” I say, “I was beside him. He died at once.”

She pleads with me gently: “Tell me. You must tell me. I
know you want to comfort me, but don’t you see, you torment
me far more than if you told me the truth? I cannot bear the
uncertainty. Tell me how it was and even though it will be ter-
rible, it will be far better than what I have to think if you don’t.”

I will never tell her, she can make mincemeat out of me
first. I pity her, but she strikes me as rather stupid all the
same. Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay
dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen
so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there
should be so much anguish over a single individual. So I say
All Quiet on the Western Front 135

rather impatiently: “He died immediately. He felt absolutely
nothing at all. His face was quite calm.”

She is silent. Then says slowly: “Will you swear it?”

“Yes.”

“By everything that is sacred to you?”

Good God, what is there that is sacred to me?—such things
change pretty quickly with us.

“Yes, he died at once.”

“Are you willing never to come back yourself, if it isn’t
true?”

“May I never come back if he wasn’t killed instantaneously.”

I would swear to anything. But she seems to believe me.
She moans and weeps steadily. I have to tell how it happened,
so I invent a story and I almost believe it myself.

As I leave she kisses me and gives me a picture of him. In
his recruit’s uniform he leans on a round rustic table with legs
made of birch branches. Behind him a wood is painted on a

curtain, and on the table stands a mug of beer.

It is the last evening at home. Everyone is silent. I go to bed
early, I seize the pillow, press it against myself and bury my
head in it. Who knows if I will ever lie in a feather bed again?

Late in the night my mother comes into my room. She
thinks I am asleep, and I pretend to be so. To talk, to stay
awake with one another, it is too hard.

She sits long into the night although she is in pain and
often writhes. At last I can bear it no longer, and pretend I
have just wakened up.

“Go and sleep, Mother, you will catch cold here.”

“I can sleep enough later,” she says.

I sit up. “I don’t go straight back to the front, Mother. I
136 Erich Maria Remarque

have to do four weeks at the training camp. I may come over
from there on Sunday, perhaps.”

She is silent. Then she asks gently: “Are you very much
afraid?”

“No Mother.”

“I would like to tell you to be on your guard against the
women out in France. They are no good.”

Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child—why can
I not put my head in your lap and weep? Why have I always
to be strong and self-controlled? I would like to weep and be
comforted too, indeed I am little more than a child; in the
wardrobe still hang short, boy’s trousers—it is such a little
time ago, why is it over?

“Where we are there aren't any women, Mother,” I say as
calmly as I can.

“And be very careful at the front, Paul.”

Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms
and die with you. What poor wretches we are!

“Yes Mother, I will.”

“I will pray for you every day, Paul.”

Ah! Mother, Mother! Let us rise up and go out, back
through the years, where the burden of all this misery lies on
us no more, back to you and me alone, Mother!

“Perhaps you can get a job that is not so dangerous.”

“Yes, Mother, perhaps I can get into the cook-house, that

can easily be done.”

 

“You do it then, and if the others say anything

 

“That won't worry me, Mother
She sighs. Her face is a white gleam in the darkness.

“Now you must go to sleep, Mother.”

She does not reply. I get up and wrap my cover round her

shoulders.
All Quiet on the Western Front 157

She supports herself on my arm, she is in pain. And so I
take her to her room. I stay with her a little while.

“And you must get well again, Mother, before I come back.”

“Yes, yes, my child.”

“You ought not to send your things to me, Mother. We
have plenty to eat out there. You can make much better use of
them here.”

How destitute she lies there in her bed, she that loves me
more than all the world. As I am about to leave, she says hast-
ily: “I have two pairs of underpants for you. They are all wool.
They will keep you warm. You must not forget to put them in
your pack.”

Ah! Mother! I know what these underpants have cost you in
waiting, and walking, and begging! Ah! Mother, Mother!
how can it be that I must part from you? Who else is there
that has any claim on me but you? Here I sit and there you are
lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

“Good-night, Mother.”

“Good-night, my child.”

The room is dark. I hear my mother’s breathing, and the
ticking of the clock. Outside the window the wind blows and
the chestnut trees rustle.

On the landing I stumble over my pack, which lies there
already made up because I have to leave early in the morning.

I bite into my pillow. I grasp the iron rods of my bed with
my fists. I ought never to have come here. 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.
Eight

I ALREADY KNOW the camp on the moors. It was here that
Himmelstoss gave Tjaden his education. But now I know
hardly anyone here; as ever, all is altered. There are only a few
people that I have occasionally met before.

I go through the routine mechanically. In the evenings I
generally go to the Soldiers’ Home, where the newspapers are
laid out, but I do not read them; still there is a piano there
that I am glad enough to play on. Two girls are in attendance,
one of them is young.

The camp is surrounded with high barbed-wire fences. If
we come back late from the Soldiers’ Home we have to show
passes. But those who are on good terms with the guard can
get through, of course.

Among the junipers and the birch trees on the moor we
practise company drill each day. It is bearable if one expects
nothing better. We advance at a run, fling ourselves down,
and our panting breath moves the stalks of the grasses and the
flowers of the heather to and fro. Looked at so closely one sees
the fine sand is composed of millions of the tiniest pebbles, as
All Quiet on the Western Front 139

clear as if they had been made in a laboratory. It is strangely
inviting to dig one’s hands into it.

But the most beautiful are the woods with their line of
birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the
stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken,
hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all
changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass
down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and
again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes
over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the
dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky—then
the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles,
with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.

I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transpar-
ent 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 an-
other to do more than joke a bit and play poker or nap in the
evenings.

Alongside our camp is the big Russian prison camp. It is
separated from us by a wire fence, but in spite of this the pris-
oners come across to us. They seem nervous and fearful, though
most of them are big fellows with beards—they look like
meek, scolded, St. Bernard dogs.

They slink about our camp and pick over the garbage tins.
One can imagine what they find there. With us food is pretty
scarce and none too good at that—turnips cut into six pieces
and boiled in water, and unwashed carrot tops—mouldy pota-
toes are tit-bits, and the chief luxury is a thin rice soup in
which float little bits of beef-sinew, but these are cut up so
small that they take a lot of finding.
140 Erich Maria Remarque

Everything gets eaten, notwithstanding, and if ever anyone
is so well off as not to want all his share, there are a dozen oth-
ers standing by ready to relieve him of it. Only the dregs that
the ladle cannot reach are tipped out and thrown into the gar-
bage tins. Along with that there sometimes go a few turnip
peelings, mouldy bread crusts and all kinds of muck.

This thin, miserable, dirty garbage is the objective of the
prisoners. They pick it out of the stinking tins greedily and go
off with it under their blouses.

It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They
have faces that make one think—honest peasant faces, broad
foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick
hair.

They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple pick-
ing. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland.

It is distressing to watch their movements, to see them
begging for something to eat. They are all rather feeble, for
they only get enough nourishment to keep them from starv-
ing. Ourselves we have not had sufficient to eat for long
enough. They have dysentery; furtively many of them display
the blood-stained tails of their shirts. Their backs, their necks
are bent, their knees sag, their heads droop as they stretch out
their hands and beg in the few words of German that they
know—beg with those soft, deep, musical voices, that are like
warm stoves and cosy rooms at home.

Some men there are who give them a kick, so that they fall
over;—but those are not many. The majority do nothing to
them, just ignore them. Occasionally, when they are too grov-
elling, it makes a man mad and then he kicks them. If only
they would not look at one so—What great misery can be in
two such small spots, no bigger than a man’s thumb—in their

eyes!
All Quiet on the Western Front 141

They come over to the camp in the evenings and trade.
They exchange whatever they possess for bread. Often they
have fair success, because they have very good boots and ours
are bad. The leather of their knee boots is wonderfully soft,
like suede. The peasants among us who get tit-bits sent from
home can afford to trade. The price of a pair of boots is about
two or three loaves of army bread, or a loaf of bread and a
small, tough ham sausage.

But most of the Russians have long since parted with what-
ever things they had. Now they wear only the most pitiful
clothing, and try to exchange little carvings and objects that
they have made out of shell fragments and copper driving
bands. Of course, they don’t get much for such things, though
they may have taken immense pains with them—they go for
a slice or two of bread. Our peasants are hard and cunning
when they bargain. They hold the piece of bread or sausage
right under the nose of the Russian till he grows pale with
greed and his eyes bulge and then he will give anything for it.
The peasants wrap up their booty with the utmost solemnity,
and then get out their big pocket knives, and slowly and de-
liberately cut off a slice of bread for themselves from their
supply and with every mouthful take a piece of the good tough
sausage and so reward themselves with a good feed. It is dis-
tressing 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. Often many stand side by
142 Erich Maria Remarque

side, and breathe the wind that comes down from the moors
and the forest.

They rarely speak and then only a few words. They are more
human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to
me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel
themselves to be more unfortunate than us. Anyway the war is
over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is
not much of a life either.

The territorials who are in charge of them say that they
were much more lively at first. They used to have intrigues
among themselves, as always happens, and it would often
come to blows and knives. But now they are quite apathetic
and listless; most of them do not masturbate any more, they
are so feeble, though otherwise things come to such a pass that
whole huts full of them do it. |

They stand at the wire fence; sometimes one goes away and
then another at once takes his place in the line. Most of them
are silent; occasionally one begs a cigarette butt.

I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. I
know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that
is exactly what troubles me. 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 bur-
dens 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 ene-
mies; 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 sever-
All Quiet on the Western Front 143

est 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 of-
ficer 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 am frightened: I dare think this way no more. This way
lies the abyss. It is not now the time but I will not lose these
thoughts, I will keep them, shut them away until the war is
ended. My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole
aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked
for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of
all human feeling; this is a task that will make life afterward
worthy of these hideous years.

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 vil-
lage 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. The prisoners saying a chorale, they sing in
parts, and it sounds almost as if there were no voices, but an
organ far away on the moor.

The burial is quickly over.

In the evening they stand again at the wire fence and the
wind comes down to them from the beech woods. The stars
are cold.

I now know a few of those who speak a little German. There

is a musician amongst them, he says he used to be a violinist
144 Erich Maria Remarque

in Berlin. When he hears that I can play the piano he fetches
his violin and plays. The others sit down and lean their backs
against the fence. He stands up and plays, sometimes he has
that absent expression which violinists get when they close
their eyes, or again he sways the instrument to the rhythm
and smiles across to me.

He plays mostly folk songs and the others hum with him.
They are like a country of dark hills that sing far down under
the ground. The sound of the violin stands like a slender girl
above it and is clear and alone. The voices cease and the violin
continues alone. In the night it is so thin it sounds frozen; one
must stand close up; it would be much better in a room—out

here it makes a man grow sad.

Because I have already had a long leave I get none on Sun-
days. So the last Sunday before I go back to the front my fa-
ther and eldest sister come over to see me. All day we sit in
the Soldiers’ Home. Where else could we go? We don’t want
to stay in the camp. About midday we go for a stroll 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 already in the hospital and will be operated on shortly.
The doctors hope she will recover, but we have never heard of
cancer being cured.

“Where is she then?” I ask.

“In the Luisa Hospital,” says my father.

“In which class?”

“Third. We must wait till we know what the operation
costs. She wanted to be in the third herself. She said that then
she would have some company. And besides it is cheaper.”
All Quiet on the Western Front 145

“So she is lying there with all those people. If only she could
sleep properly.”

My father nods. His face is broken and full of furrows. My
mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone
to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a
great deal of money, and my father’s life has been practically
given up to it.

“If only I knew how much the operation costs,” says he.

“Have you not asked?”

“Not directly. I cannot do that—the surgeon might take it
amiss and that would not do; he must operate on Mother.”

Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all
poor people. They don’t dare ask the price, but worry them-
selves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for
whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter
of course. And the doctor does not take it amiss from them.

“The dressings afterwards are so expensive,” says my father.

“Doesn’t the Invalid’s Fund pay anything toward it, then?”
I ask.

“Mother has been ill too long.”

“Have you any money at all?”

He shakes his head: “No, but I can do some overtime.”

I know. He will stand at his desk folding and pasting and
cutting until twelve o'clock at night. At eight o'clock in the
evening he will eat some miserable rubbish they get in ex-
change for their food tickets, then he will take a powder for
his headache and work on.

In order to cheer him up a bit I tell him a few stories, sol-
diers’ jokes and the like, about generals and sergeant-majors.

Afterwards I accompany them both to the railway station.
They give me a pot of jam and a bag of potato-cakes that my
mother has made for me.
146 Erich Maria Remarque

Then they go off and I return to the camp.

In the evening I spread the jam on the cakes and eat some.
But I have no taste for them. So I go out to give them to the
Russians. Then it occurs to me that my mother cooked them
herself and that she was probably in pain as she stood before
the hot stove. I put the bag back in my pack and take only two
cakes to the Russians.
Nine

 

WE TRAVEL FOR several days. The first aeroplanes appear in
the sky. We roll on past transport lines. Guns, guns. The light
railway picks us up. I search for my regiment. No one knows
exactly where it lies. Somewhere or other I put up for the
night, somewhere or other I receive provisions and a few vague
instructions. And so with my pack and my rifle I set out again
on the way.

By the time I come up they are no longer in the devastated
place. 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. They tell me of heavy losses that we have been
having. I inquire after Kat and Albert. No one knows any-
thing of them.

I search farther and wander about here and there; it is a
strange feeling. One night more and then another I camp out
like a Red Indian. Then at last I get some definite informa-
tion, and by the afternoon I am able to report to the Orderly
Room.

The sergeant-major detains me there. The company comes
148 Erich Maria Remarque

back in two days’ time. There is no object in sending me up
now.

“What was it like on leave?” he asks, “pretty good, eh?”

“In parts,” I say.

“Yes,” he sighs, “yes, if a man didn’t have to come away
again. The second half is always rather messed up by that.”

I loaf around until the company comes back in the early
morning, grey, dirty, soured, and gloomy. Then I jump up,
push in amongst them, my eyes searching. There is Tjaden,
there is Miiller blowing his nose, and there are Kat and Kropp.
We arrange our sacks of straw side by side. I have an uneasy
conscience when I look at them, and yet without any good
reason. Before we turn in I bring out the rest of the potato-
cakes and jam so that they can have some too.

The outer cakes are mouldy, still it is possible to eat them.
I keep those for myself and give the fresh one to Kat and
Kropp.

Kat chews and says: “These are from your mother?”

I nod.

“Good,” says he, “I can tell by the taste.”

I could almost weep. I can hardly control myself any longer.
But it will soon be all right again back here with Kat and
Albert. This is where I belong.

“You've been lucky,” whispers Kropp to me before we drop
off to sleep, “they say we are going to Russia.”

To Russia? It’s not much of a war over there.

In the distance the front thunders. The walls of the hut
rattle.

There's a great deal of polishing being done. We are inspected
at every turn. Everything that is torn is exchanged for new. I
All Quiet on the Western Front 149

score a spotless new tunic out of it and Kat, of course, an en-
tire outfit. A rumour is going round that there may be peace,
but the other story is more likely—that we are bound for Rus-
sia. Still, what do we need new things for in Russia? At last it
leaks out—the Kaiser is coming to review us. Hence all the
inspections.

For eight whole days one would suppose we were in a base-
camp, there is so much drill and fuss. Everyone is peevish and
touchy, we do not take kindly to all this polishing, much less
to the full-dress parades. Such things exasperate a soldier more
than the front-line.

At last the moment arrives. We stand to attention and the
Kaiser appears. We are curious to see what he looks like. He
stalks along the line, and I am really rather disappointed;
judging from his pictures I imagined him to be bigger and
more powerfully built, and above all to have a thundering
voice.

He distributes Iron Crosses, speaks to this man and that.
Then we march off.

Afterwards we discuss it. Tjaden says with astonishment:

“So that is the All-Highest! And everyone, bar nobody, has
to stand up stiff in front of him!” He meditates: “Hindenburg
too, he has to stand up stiff to him, eh?”

“Sure,” says Kat.

Tjaden hasn’t finished yet. He thinks for a while and then
asks: “And would a king have to stand up stiff to an emperor?”

None of us is quite sure about it, but we don’t suppose so.
They are both so exalted that standing strictly to attention is
probably not insisted on.

“What rot you do hatch out,” says Kat. “The main point is
that you have to stand stiff yourself.”

But Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is
I50 Erich Maria Remarque

blowing bubbles. “But look,” he announces, “I simply can’t
believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I
have.”

“You can bet your boots on it.”

“Four and a half-wit make seven,” says Kat. “You've got a
maggot in your brain, Tjaden, just you run along to the la-
trine quick, and get your head clear, so that you don’t talk like
a two-year-old.”

Tjaden disappears.

“But what I would like to know,” says Albert, “is whether
there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No.”

“I'm sure there would,” I interject, “he was against it from
the first.”

“Well, if not him alone, then perhaps if twenty or thirty
people in the world had said No.”

“That's probable,” I agree, “but they damned well said
Yes.”

“It’s queer, when one thinks about it,” goes on Kropp, “we
are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over
there to protect their fatherland. Now who's in the right?”

“Perhaps both,” say I without believing it.

“Yes, well now,” pursues Albert, and I see that he means
to drive me into a corner, “but our professors and parsons
and newspapers say that we are the only ones that are right,
and let’s hope so;—but the French professors and parsons and
newspapers say that the right is on their side, now what about
that?”

“That I don’t know,” I say, “but whichever way it is there's
war all the same and every month more countries coming in.”

Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins
the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started.
All Quiet on the Western Front 151

“Mostly by one country badly offending another,” answers
Albert with a slight air of superiority.

The Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. “A country? I don’t fol-
low. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in
France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.”

“Are you really as stupid as that, or are you just pulling my
leg?” growls Kropp. “I don’t mean that at all. One people of-
fends the other

 

“Then I haven't any business here at all,” replies Tjaden, “I
don’t feel myself offended.”

“Well, let me tell you,” says Albert sourly, “it doesn’t apply
to tramps like you.”

“Then I can be going home right away,” retorts Tjaden, and
we all laugh.

“Ach, man! he means the people as a whole, the State

 

exclaims Miiller.

“State, State”—Tjaden snaps his fingers contemptuously,
“Gendarmes, police, taxes, that’s your State;—if that’s what
you are talking about, no, thank you.”

“That's right,” says Kat, “you've said something for once,
Tjaden. State and home-country, there’s a big difference.”

“But they go together,” insists Kropp, “without the State
there wouldn't be any home-country.”

“True, but just you consider, almost all of us are simple
folk. And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers,
workmen, or poor clerks. Now just why would a French black-
smith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it is
merely the rulers. I had never seen a Frenchman before I came
here, and it will be just the same with the majority of French-
men as regards us. They weren't asked about it any more than
we were.”
152 Erich Maria Remarque

“Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to
whom the war is useful.”

“Well, I'm not one of them,” grins Tjaden.

“Not you, nor anybody else here.”

“Who are they then?” persists Tjaden. “It isn’t any use to
the Kaiser either. He has everything he can want already.”

“I'm not so sure about that,” contradicts Kat, “he has not
had a war up till now. And every full-grown emperor requires
at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous. You
look in your school books.”

“And generals too,” adds Detering, “they become famous
through war.”

“Even more famous than emperors,” adds Kat.

“There are other people back behind there who profit by the
war, that’s certain,” growls Detering.

“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.”

“But there are more lies told by the other side than by us,”
say I; “just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on
them, where it says that we eat Belgian children. The fellows
who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves.
They are real culprits.”

Miiller gets up. “Anyway, it is better that the war is here
instead of in Germany. Just you look at the shell-holes.”

“True,” assents Tjaden, “but no war at all would be better
still.”

He is quite proud of himself because he has scored for once
over us volunteers. And his opinion is quite typical, here one
meets it time and again, and there is nothing with which one
All Quiet on the Western Front 153

can properly counter it, because that is the limit of their com-
prehension of the factors involved. The national feeling of the
tommy resolves itself into this—here he is. But that is the end
of it; everything else he criticizes from his own practical point
of view.

Albert lies down on the grass and growls angrily: “The best
thing is not to talk about the rotten business.”

“It won't make any difference, that’s sure,” agrees Kat.

To make matters worse, we have to return almost all the
new things and take back our old rags again. The good ones

were merely for the inspection.

Instead of going to Russia, we go up the line again. On the
way we pass through a devastated wood with the tree trunks
shattered and the ground ploughed up.

At several places there are tremendous craters. “Great guns,
something’s hit that,” I say to Kat.

“Trench mortars,” he replies, and then points up at one of
the trees.

In the branches dead men are hanging. A naked soldier is
squatting in the fork of a tree, he still has his helmet on, oth-
erwise he is entirely unclad. There is only half of him sitting
up there, the top half, the legs are missing.

“What can that mean?” I ask.

“He’s been blown out of his clothes,” mutters Tjaden.

“It’s funny,” says Kat, “we have seen that several times now.
If a mortar gets you it blows you clean out of your clothes. It’s
the concussion that does it.”

I search around. And so it is. Here hang bits of uniform,
and somewhere else is plastered a bloody mess that was once a
human limb. Over there lies a body with nothing but a piece
154 Erich Maria Remarque

of the underpants on one leg and the collar of the tunic around
its neck. Otherwise it is naked and the clothes are hanging up
in the tree. Both arms are missing as though they had been
pulled out. I discover one of them twenty yards off in a shrub.

The dead man lies on his face. There, where the arm wounds
are, the earth is black with blood. Underfoot the leaves are
scratched up as though the man had been kicking.

“That's no joke, Kat,” says I.

“No more is a shell splinter in the belly,” he replies, shrug-
ging his shoulders.

“But don’t get tender-hearted,” says Tjaden.

All this can only have happened a little while ago, the blood
is still fresh. As everybody we see there is dead we do not
waste any more time, but report the affair at the next stretcher-
bearers’ post. After all it is not our business to take these

stretcher-bearers’ jobs away from them.

A patrol has to be sent out to discover just how strongly the
enemy position is manned. Since my leave I feel a certain
strange attachment to the other fellows, and so I volunteer to
go with them. We agree on a plan, slip out through the wire
and then divide and creep forward separately. After a while I
find a shallow shell-hole and crawl into it. From here I peer
forward.

There is moderate machine-gun fire. It sweeps across from
all directions, not very heavy, but always sufficient to make
one keep down.

A parachute star-shell opens out. The ground lies stark in
the pale light, and then the darkness shuts down again blacker
than ever. In the trenches we were told there were black troops
in front of us. That is nasty, it is hard to see them; they are
All Quiet on the Western Front 155

very good at patrolling, too. And oddly enough they are often
quite stupid; for instance, both Kat and Kropp were once able
to shoot down a black enemy patrol because the fellows in
their enthusiasm for cigarettes smoked while they were creep-
ing about. Kat and Albert had simply to aim at the glowing
ends of the cigarettes.

A bomb or something lands close beside me. I have not
heard it coming and am terrified. At the same moment a
senseless fear takes hold of me. Here I am alone and almost
helpless in the dark—perhaps two other eyes have been watch-
ing me for a long while from another shell-hole in front of me,
and a bomb lies ready to blow me to pieces. I try to pull my-
self together. It is not my first patrol and not a particularly
risky one. But it is the first since my leave, and besides, the lie
of the land is still rather strange to me.

I tell myself that my alarm is absurd, that there is probably
nothing at all there in the darkness watching me, otherwise
they would not be firing so low.

It is in vain. In whirling confusion my thoughts hum in my
brain—I hear the warning voice of my mother, I see the Rus-
sians with the flowing beards leaning against the wire fence, I
have a bright picture of a canteen with stools, of a cinema in
Valenciennes; tormented, terrified, in my imagination I see
the grey, implacable muzzle of a rifle which moves noiselessly
before me whichever way I try to turn my head. The sweat
breaks out from every pore.

I still continue to lie in the shallow bowl. I look at the time;
only a few minutes have passed. My forehead is wet, the sock-
ets of my eyes are damp, my hands tremble, and I am panting
softly. It is nothing but an awful spasm of fear, a simple ani-
mal fear of poking out my head and crawling on farther.

All my efforts subside like froth into the one desire to be
156 Erich Maria Remarque

able just to stay lying there. My limbs are glued to the earth.
I make a vain attempt;—they refuse to come away. I press
myself down on the earth, I cannot go forward, I make up my
mind to stay lying there.

But immediately the wave floods over me anew, a mingled
sense of shame, of remorse, and yet at the same time of secu-
rity. I raise myself up a little to take a look round.

My eyes burn with staring into the dark. A star-shell goes
up;—I duck down again.

I wage a wild and senseless fight, I want to get out of the
hollow and yet slide back into it again; I say “You must, it is
your comrades, it is not an idiotic command,” and again:
“What does it matter to me, I have only one life to lose

 

That is the result of all this leave, I plead in extenuation.
But I cannot reassure myself; I become terribly faint. I raise
myself slowly and reach forward with my arms, dragging my
body after me and then lie on the edge of the shell-hole, half
in and half out.

There I hear sounds and drop back. Suspicious sounds can
be detected clearly despite the noise of the artillery-fire. I lis-
ten; the sound is behind me. They are our people moving
along the trench. Now I hear muffled voices. To judge by the
tone that might be Kat talking.

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;—1I belong to them and they to me; we all share the
All Quiet on the Western Front 157

same fear and the same life, we are nearer than lovers, in a
simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these
voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.

Cautiously I glide out over the edge and snake my way for-
ward. I shuffle along on all fours a bit farther, I keep track of
my bearings, look around me and observe the distribution of
the gunfire so as to able to find my way back. Then I try to get
in touch with the others.

I am still afraid, but it is an intelligent fear, an extraordi-
narily heightened caution. The night is windy and shadows
flit hither and thither in the flicker of the gunfire. It reveals
too little and too much. Often I pause, stock still, motionless,
and always for nothing. Thus I advance a long way and then
turn back in a wide curve. I have not established touch with
the others. Every yard nearer our trench fills me with
confidence—and with haste, too. It would be bad to get hit
now.

Then a new fear lays hold of me. I can no longer remember
the direction. Quiet, I squat in a shell-hole and try to locate
myself. More than once it has happened that some fellow has
jumped joyfully into a trench, only then to discover that it
was the wrong one.

After a little time I listen again, but still I am not sure. The
confusion of shell-holes now seems so bewildering that I can
no longer tell in my agitation which way I should go. Perhaps
I am crawling parallel to the lines, and that might go on for-
ever. So I crawl round once again in a wide curve.

These damned rockets! They seem to burn for an hour, and
a man cannot make the least movement without bringing the
bullets whistling round.
158 Erich Maria Remarque

But there is nothing for it, I must get out. Falteringly I
work my way farther, I move off over the ground like a crab
and rip my hands sorely on the jagged splinters, as sharp as
razor blades. Often I think that the sky is becoming lighter on
the horizon, but it may be merely my imagination. Then
gradually I realize that to crawl in the right direction is a mat-
ter of life or death.

A shell crashes. Almost immediately two others. And then
it begins in earnest. A bombardment. Machine-guns rattle.
Now there is nothing for it but to stay lying low. Apparently
an attack is coming. Everywhere the rockets shoot up. Un-
ceasing.

I lie huddled in a large shell-hole, my legs in the water up
to the belly. When the attack starts I will let myself fall into
the water, with my face as deep in the mud as I can keep it
without suffocating. I must pretend to be dead.

Suddenly I hear the barrage lift. At once I slip down into
the water, my helmet on the nape of my neck and my mouth
just clear so that I can get a breath of air.

I lie motionless;—somewhere something clanks, it stamps
and stumbles nearer—all my nerves become taut and icy. It
clatters over me and away, the first wave has passed. I have but
this one shattering thought: What will you do if someone
jumps into your shell-hole?—Swiftly I pull out my little dag-
ger, grasp it fast and bury it in my hand once again under the
mud. If anyone jumps in here I will go for him. It hammers in
my forehead; at once, stab him clean through the throat, so
that he cannot call out; that’s the only way; he will be just as
frightened as I am; when in terror we fall upon one another,
then I must be first.

Now our batteries are firing. A shell lands near me. That
All Quiet on the Western Front 159

makes me savage with fury, all it needs now is to be killed by
our own shells; I curse and grind my teeth in the mud; it is a
raving frenzy; in the end all I can do is groan and pray.

The crash of the shells bursts in my ears. If our fellows make
a counter-raid I will be saved. I press my head against the
earth and listen to the muffled thunder, like the explosions of
quarrying—and raise it again to listen for the sounds on top.

The machine-guns rattle. I know our barbed wire entangle-
ments are strong and almost undamaged;—parts of them are
charged with a powerful electric current. The rifle fire in-
creases. They have not broken through; they have to retreat.

I sink down again, huddled, strained to the uttermost. The
banging, the creeping, the clanging becomes audible. One
single cry yelling amongst it all. They are raked with fire, the
attack is repulsed.

Already it has become somewhat lighter. Steps hasten over
me. The first. Gone. Again, another. The rattle of machine-
guns becomes an unbroken chain. Just as I am about to turn
round a little, something heavy stumbles, and with a crash a
body falls over me into the shell-hole, slips down, and lies
across me—

I do not think at all, I make no decision—I strike madly at
home, and feel only how the body suddenly convulses, then
becomes limp, and collapses. When I recover myself, my hand
is sticky and wet.

The man gurgles. It sounds to me as though he bellows,
every gasping breath is like a cry, a thunder—but it is not
only my heart pounding. I want to stop his mouth, stuff it
with earth, stab him again, he must be quiet, he is betraying
160 Erich Maria Remarque

me; now at last I regain control of myself, but have suddenly
become so feeble that I cannot any more lift my hand against
him.

So I crawl away to the farthest corner and stay there, my
eyes glued on him, my hand grasping the knife—ready, if he
stirs, to spring at him again. But he won’t do so any more, I
can hear that already in his gurgling.

I can see him indistinctly. I have but one desire, to get away.
If it is not soon it will be too light; it will be difficult enough
now. Then as I try to raise up my head I see it is impossible
already. The machine-gunfire so sweeps the ground that I
should be shot through and through before I could make one
jump.

I test it once with my helmet, which I take off and hold up
to find out the level of the shots. The next moment it is
knocked out of my hand by a bullet. The fire is sweeping very
low to the ground. I am not far enough from the enemy line
to escape being picked off by one of the snipers if I attempt to
get away.

The light increases. Burning I wait for our attack. My hands
are white at the knuckles, I clench them so tightly in my
longing for the fire to cease so that my comrades may come.

Minute after minute trickles away. I dare not look again at
the dark figure in the shell-hole. With an effort I look past it
and wait, wait. The bullets hiss, they make a steel net, never
ceasing, never ceasing.

Then I notice my bloody hand and suddenly feel nauseated.
I take some earth and rub the skin with it; now my hand is
muddy and the blood cannot be seen any more.

The fire does not diminish. It is equally heavy from both
sides. Our fellows have probably given me up for lost long

ago.
All Quiet on the Western Front 101

It is early morning, clear and grey. The gurgling continues, I
stop my ears, but soon take my fingers away again, because
then I cannot hear the other sound.

The figure opposite me moves. I shrink together and invol-
untarily look at it. Then my eyes remain glued to it. A man
with a small pointed beard lies there; his head is fallen to one
side, one arm is halfbent, his head rests helplessly upon it. The
other hand lies on his chest, it is bloody.

He is dead, I say to myself, he must be dead, he doesn’t feel
anything any more; it is only the body that is gurgling there.
Then the head tries to raise itself, for a moment the groaning
becomes louder, his forehead sinks back upon his arm. The
man is not dead, he is dying, but he is not dead. I drag myself
toward him, hesitate, support myself on my hands, creep a bit
farther, wait, again a terrible journey. At last I am beside him.

Then he opens his eyes. He must have heard me, for he
gazes at me with a look of utter terror. The body lies still, but
in the eyes there is such an extraordinary expression of fright
that for a moment I think they have power enough to carry
the body off with them. Hundreds of miles away with one
bound. The body is still perfectly still, without a sound, the
gurgle has ceased, but the eyes cry out, yell, all the life is gath-
ered together in them for one tremendous effort to flee, gath-
ered together there in a dreadful terror of death, of me.

My legs give way and I drop on my elbows. “No, no,” I
whisper.

The eyes follow me. I am powerless to move so long as they
are there.

Then his hand slips slowly from his breast, only a little bit,

it sinks just a few inches, but this movement breaks the power
162 Erich Maria Remarque

of the eyes. I bend forward, shake my head and whisper: “No,
no, no,” I raise one hand, I must show him that I want to help
him, I stroke his forehead.

The eyes shrink back as the hand comes, then they lose
their stare, the eyelids droop lower, the tension is past. I open
his collar and place his head more comfortably.

His mouth stands half open, it tries to form words. The lips
are dry. My water bottle is not there. I have not brought it
with me. But there is water in the mud, down at the bottom
of the crater. I climb down, take out my handkerchief, spread
it out, push it under and scoop up the yellow water that strains
through into the hollow of my hand.

He gulps it down. I fetch some more. Then I unbutton his
tunic in order to bandage him if it is possible. In any case I
must do it, so that if the fellows over there capture me they
will see that I wanted to help him, and so will not shoot me.
He tries to resist, but his hand is too feeble. The shirt is stuck
and will not come away, it is buttoned at the back. So there is
nothing for it but to cut it open.

I look for the knife and find it again. But when I begin to
cut the shirt the eyes open once more and the cry is in them
again and the demented expression, so that I must close them,
press them shut and whisper: “I want to help you, Comrade,

»

camerade, camerade, camerade eagerly repeating the

 

word, to make him understand.
There are three stabs. My field dressing covers them, the
blood runs out under it, I press it tighter; there; he groans.

That is all I can do. Now we must wait, wait.

These hours. . . . The gurgling starts again—but how slowly
a man dies! For this I know—he cannot be saved, I have, in-
All Quiet on the Western Front 163

deed, tried to tell myself that he will be, but at noon this
pretence breaks down and melts before his groans. If only I
had not lost my revolver crawling about, I would shoot him.
Stab him I cannot.

By noon I am groping on the outer limits of reason. Hun-
ger devours me, I could almost weep for something to eat, I
cannot struggle against it. Again and again I fetch water for
the dying man and drink some myself.

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 Miiller have experienced it already, when they have hit
someone; it happens to many, in hand-to-hand fighting espe-
cially—

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.

In the afternoon, about three, he is dead.

I breathe freely again. But only for a short time. Soon the
silence is more unbearable than the groans. I wish the gur-
gling were there again, gasping hoarse, now whistling softly
and again hoarse and loud.

It is mad, what I do. But I must do something. I prop the
dead man up again so that he lies comfortably, although he
feels nothing any more. I close his eyes. They are brown, his
hair is black and a bit curly at the sides.

The mouth is full and soft beneath his moustache; the nose is
slightly arched, the skin brownish; it is now not so pale as it was
before, when he was still alive. For a moment the face seems
almost healthy;—then it collapses suddenly into the strange
face of the dead that I have so often seen, strange faces, all alike.
164 Erich Maria Remarque

No doubt his wife still thinks of him; she does not know
what happened. He looks as if he would have often written to
her;—she will still be getting mail from him—To-morrow, in
a week's time—perhaps even a stray letter a month hence. She
will read it, and in it he will be speaking to her.

My state is getting worse, I can no longer control my
thoughts. What would his wife look like? Like the little bru-
nette on the other side of the canal? Does she belong to me
now? Perhaps by this act she becomes mine. I wish Kantorek

 

were sitting here beside me. If my mother could see me ;
The dead man might have had thirty more years of life if only
I had impressed the way back to our trench more sharply on
my memory. If only he had run two yards farther to the left,
he might now be sitting in the trench over there and writing
a fresh letter to his wife.

But I will get no further that way; for that is the fate of all
of us: if Kemmerich’s leg had been six inches to the right: if
Haie Westhus had bent his back three inches further for-

ward

 

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 sen-
sible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstrac-
tion 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
All Quiet on the Western Front 165

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 uni-
form 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.
The bullets rain over, they are not fired haphazard, but
shrewdly aimed from all sides. I cannot get out.

“I will write to your wife,” I say hastily to the dead man, “I
will write to her, she must hear it from me, I will tell her ev-
erything I have told you, she shall not suffer, I will help her,

”»

and your parents too, and your child

 

His tunic is half open. The pocket-book 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.

Irresolutely I take the wallet in my hand. It slips out of my
hand and falls open. Some pictures and letters drop out. I
gather them up and want to put them back again, but the
strain I am under, the uncertainty, the hunger, the danger,
these hours with the dead man have made me desperate, I
want to hasten the relief, to intensify and to end the torture,
as one strikes an unendurably painful hand against the trunk
of a tree, regardless of everything.

There are portraits of a woman and a little girl, small ama-
teur photographs taken against an ivy-clad wall. Along with
them are letters. I take them out and try to read them. Most
of it I do not understand, it is so hard to decipher and I scarcely
166 Erich Maria Remarque

know any French. But each word I translate pierces me like a
shot in the chest;—Ilike a stab in the chest.

My brain is taxed beyond endurance. But I realize this
much, that I will never dare to write to these people as I in-
tended. Impossible. I look at the portraits once more; they are
clearly not rich people. I might send them money anony-
mously if I earn anything later on. I seize upon that, it is at
least something to hold on to. This dead man is bound up
with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise every-
thing in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to
live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to
placate him—and deep down in me lies the hope that I may
buy myself off in this way and perhaps even get out of this; it
is a little stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will
see to it. So I open the book and read slowly:—Gérard Duval,
COmMpoSItor.

With the dead man’s pencil I write the address on an enve-
lope, then swiftly thrust everything back into his tunic.

I have killed the printer, Gérard Duval. I must be a printer,

 

I think confusedly, be a printer, printer

By afternoon I am calmer. My fear was groundless. The name
troubles me no more. The madness passes. “Comrade,” I say to
the dead man, but I say it calmly, “to-day you, to-morrow me.
But if I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that
has struck us both down; from you, taken life—and from
me—? Life also. I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen
again.”

The sun strikes low, I am stupefied with exhaustion and
hunger. Yesterday is like a fog to me, there is no hope of ever
getting out of this. I fall into a doze and do not at first realize
All Quiet on the Western Front 167

that evening is approaching. The twilight comes. It seems to
me to come quickly now. One hour more. If it were summer,
it would be three hours more. One hour more.

Now suddenly I begin to tremble; something might hap-
pen in the interval. I think no more of the dead man, he is of
no consequence to me now. With one bound the lust to live
flares up again and everything that has filled my thoughts
goes down before it. Now, merely to avert any ill-luck, I bab-
ble mechanically: “I will fulfil everything, fulfil everything I

have promised you ” but already I know that I shall not

 

do so.

Suddenly it occurs to me that my own comrades may fire on
me as I creep up; they do not know I am coming. I will call
out as soon as I can so that they will recognize me. I will stay
lying in front of the trench until they answer me.

The first star. The front remains quiet. I breathe deeply and
talk to myself in my excitement: “No foolishness now, Paul—
Quiet, Paul, quiet—then you will be saved, Paul.” When I
use my Christian name it works as though someone else spoke
it to me, it has more power.

The darkness grows. My excitement subsides, I wait cau-
tiously until the first rocket goes up. Then I crawl out of the
shell-hole. I have forgotten the dead man. Before me lies the
oncoming night and the pale gleaming field. I fix my eyes on a
shell-hole; the moment the light dies I scurry over into it, grope
farther, spring into the next, duck down, scramble onward.

I come nearer. There, by the light of the rocket I see some-
thing move in the wire, then it stiffens and I lie still. Next
time I see it again, yes, they are men from our trench. But I
am suspicious until I recognize our helmets. Then I call.

And immediately an answer rings out, my name: “Paul—
Paul »

 
168 Erich Maria Remarque

I call again in answer. It is Kat and Albert who have come
out with a stretcher to look for me.

“Are you wounded?”

“No, no——"

We drop into the trench. I ask for something to eat and
wolf it down. Miiller gives me a cigarette. In a few words I tell
what happened. There is nothing new about it; it happens
quite often. The night attack is the only unusual feature of the
business. In Russia Kat once lay for two days behind the
enemy lines before he could make his way back.

I do not mention the dead printer. :

But by next morning I can keep it to myself no longer. I
must tell Kat and Albert. They both try to calm me. “You
can’t do anything about it. What else could you have done?
That is what you are here for.”

I listen to them and feel comforted, reassured by their pres-
ence. It was mere drivelling nonsense that I talked out there
in the shell-hole.

“Look there for instance,” points Kat.

On the fire-step stand some snipers. They rest their rifles
with telescopic sights on the parapet and watch the enemy
front. Once and again a shot cracks out.

Then we hear the cry: “That’s found a billet!” “Did you see
how he leapt in the air?” Sergeant Oellrich turns round
proudly and scores his point. He heads the shooting list for
to-day with three unquestionable hits.

“What do you say to that?” asks Kat.

I nod.

“If he keeps that up he will get a little coloured bird for his
buttonhole by this evening,” says Albert.

“Or rather he will soon be made acting sergeant-major,”

says Kat.
All Quiet on the Western Front 169

We look at one another. “I would not do it,” I say.

“All the same,” says Kat, “it’s very good for you to see it
just now.”

Sergeant Oellrich returns to the fire-step. The muzzle of his
rifle searches to and fro.

“You don’t need to lose any sleep over your affair,” nods
Albert.

And now I hardly understand it myself any more.

“It was only because I had to lie there with him so long,” I
say. “After all, war is war.”

Oellrich’s rifle cracks out sharply and dry.
Ten

WE HAVE DROPPED in for a good job. Eight of us have to
guard a village that has been abandoned because it is being
shelled too heavily.

In particular we have to watch the supply dump as that is
not empty yet. We are supposed to provision ourselves from
the same store. We are just the right people for that;—Kat,
Albert, Miiller, Tjaden, Detering, our whole gang is there.
Haie is dead, though. But we are mighty lucky all the same,
all the other squads have had more casualties than we have.

We select, as a dug-out, a reinforced concrete cellar into
which steps lead down from above. The entrance is protected
by a separate concrete wall.

Now we develop an immense industry. This is an opportu-
nity not only to stretch one’s legs, but to stretch one’s soul
also. We make the best use of such opportunities. The war is
too desperate to allow us to be sentimental for long. That is
only possible so long as things are not going too badly. After
all, we cannot afford to be anything but matter-of-fact. So
matter-of-fact, indeed, that I often shudder when a thought
All Quiet on the Western Front 171

from the days before the war comes momentarily into my
head. But it does not stay long.

We have to take things as lightly as we can, so we make the
most of every opportunity, and nonsense stands stark and im-
mediate beside horror. It cannot be otherwise, that is how we
hearten ourselves. So we zealously set to work to create an
idyll—an idyll of eating and sleeping of course.

The floor is first covered with mattresses which we haul in
from the houses. Even a soldier’s behind likes to sit soft.
Only in the middle of the floor is there any clear space. Then
we furnish ourselves with blankets, and eiderdowns, luxuri-
ous soft affairs. There is plenty of everything to be had in the
village. Albert and I find a mahogany bed which can be
taken to pieces with a sky of blue silk and a lace coverlet. We
sweat like monkeys moving it in, but a man cannot let a
thing like that slip, and it would certainly be shot to pieces
in a day or two.

Kat and I do a little patrolling through the houses. In very
short time we have collected a dozen eggs and two pounds of
fairly fresh butter. Suddenly there is a crash in the drawing-
room, and an iron stove hurtles through the wall past us and
on, a yard from us out through the wall behind. Two holes. It
comes from the house opposite where a shell has just landed.
“The swine,” grimaces Kat, and we continue our search. All at
once we prick up our ears, hurry across, and suddenly stand
petrified—there running up and down in a little sty are two
live sucking pigs. We rub our eyes and look once again to
make certain. Yes, they are still there. We seize hold of
them—no doubt about it, two real young pigs.

This will make a grand feed. About twenty yards from our
dug-out there is a small house that was used as an officers’ bil-
let. In the kitchen is an immense fireplace with two ranges,
172 Erich Maria Remarque

pots, pans, and kettles—everything, even to a stack of small
chopped wood in an outhouse—a regular cook’s paradise.

Two of our fellows have been out in the fields all the morn-
ing hunting for potatoes, carrots and green peas. We are quite
uppish and sniff at the tinned stuff in the supply dump, we
want fresh vegetables. In the dining-room there are already
two heads of cauliflower.

The sucking pigs are slaughtered. Kat sees to them. We
want to make potato-cakes to go with the roast. But we can-
not find a grater for the potatoes. However, the difficulty is
soon got over. With a nail we punch a lot of holes in a pot lid
and there we have a grater. Three fellows put on thick gloves
to protect their fingers against the grater, two others peel the
potatoes, and the business gets going.

Kat takes charge of the sucking pigs, the carrots, the peas,
and the cauliflower. He even mixes a white sauce for the cau-
liflower. I fry the pancakes, four at a time. After ten minutes I
get the knack of tossing the pan so that the pancakes which
are done on one side sail up, turn in the air and are caught
again as they come down. The sucking pigs are roasted whole.
We all stand round them as before an altar.

In the meantime we receive visitors, a couple of wireless-
men, who are generously invited to the feed. They sit in the
living-room where there is a piano. One of them plays, the
other sings “An der Weser.” He sings feelingly, but with a
rather Saxon accent. All the same it moves us as we stand at
the fireplace preparing the good things.

Then we begin to realize we are in for trouble. The observa-
tion balloons have spotted the smoke from our chimney, and
the shells start to drop on us. They are those damned spraying
little daisy-cutters that make only a small hole and scatter
widely close to the ground. They keep dropping closer and
All Quiet on the Western Front 175

closer all round us; still we cannot leave the grub in the lurch.
A couple of splinters whizz through the top of the kitchen
window. The roast is ready. But frying the pancakes is getting
difficult. The explosions come so fast that the splinters strike
again and again against the wall of the house and sweep in
through the window. Whenever I hear a shell coming I drop
down on one knee with the pan and the pancakes, and duck
behind the wall of the window. Immediately afterwards I am
up again and going on with the frying.

The Saxon stops singing—a fragment has smashed the
piano. At last everything is ready and we organize the trans-
port of it back to the dug-out. After the next explosion two
men dash across the fifty yards to the dug-out with the pots of
vegetables. We see them disappear.

The next shot. Everyone ducks and then two more trot off,
each with a big can of finest grade coffee, and reach the dug-
out before the next explosion.

Then Kat and Kropp seize the masterpiece—the big dish
with the brown, roasted sucking pigs. A screech, a knee end,
and away they race over the fifty yards of open country.

I stay to finish my last four pancakes; twice I have to drop
to the floor;—after all, it means four pancakes more, and they
are my favourite dish.

Then I grab the plate with the great pile of cakes and
squeeze myself behind the house door. A hiss, a crash, and I
gallop off with the plate clamped against my chest with both
hands. I am almost in, there is a rising screech, I bound, I run
like a deer, sweep round the wall, fragments clatter against the
concrete, I tumble down the cellar steps, my elbows are
skinned, but I have not lost a single pancake, nor even upset
the plate.

At two o'clock we start the meal. It lasts till six. We drink
174 Erich Maria Remarque

coffee until half-past six—officer’s coffee from the supply
dump—and smoke officer’s cigars and cigarettes—also from
the supply dump. Punctually at half-past six we begin supper.
At ten o'clock we throw the bones of the sucking pigs outside
the door. Then there is cognac and rum—also from the blessed
supply dump—and once again long, fat cigars with belly-
bands. Tjaden says that it lacks only one thing: Girls from an
officer’s brothel.

Late in the evening we hear mewing. A little grey cat sits
in the entrance. We entice it in and give it something to eat.
And that wakes up our own appetites once more. Still chew-
ing, we lie down to sleep.

But the night is bad. We have eaten too much fat. Fresh
baby pig is very griping to the bowels. There is an everlasting
coming and going in the dug-out. Two, three men with their
pants down are always sitting about outside and cursing. I
have been out nine times myself. About four o'clock in the
morning we reach a record: all eleven men, guards and visi-
tors, are squatting outside.

Burning houses stand out like torches against the night.
Shells lumber across and crash down. Munition columns tear
along the street. On one side the supply dump has been ripped
open. In spite of all the flying fragments the drivers of the
munition columns pour in like a swarm of bees and pounce on
the bread. We let them have their own way. If we said any-
thing it would only mean a good hiding for us. So we go dif-
ferently about it. We explain that we are the guard and so
know our way about, we get hold of the tinned stuff and ex-
change it for things we are short of. What does it matter any-
how—in a while it will all be blown to pieces. For ourselves
we take some chocolate from the depot and eat it in slabs. Kat
says it is good for loose bowels.
All Quiet on the Western Front 175

Almost a fortnight passes thus in eating, drinking and
roaming about. No one disturbs us. The village gradually
vanishes under the shells and we lead a charmed life. So long
as any part of the supply dump still stands we don’t worry, we
desire nothing better than to stay here till the end of the war.

Tjaden has become so fastidious that he only half smokes
his cigars. With his nose in the air he explains to us that he
was brought up that way. And Kat is most cheerful. In the
morning his first call is: “Emil, bring in the caviare and cof-
fee.” We put on extraordinary airs, every man treats the other
as his valet, bounces him and gives him orders. “There is
something itching under my foot; Kropp my man, catch that
louse at once,” says Leer, poking out his leg at him like a ballet
girl, and Albert drags him up the stairs by the foot. “Tjaden!”—
“What?”—"“Stand at ease, Tjaden; and what's more, don’t say
“What,” say “Yes, Sir,—now: Tjaden!” Tjaden retorts in the
well-known phrase from Goethe’s “Gotz von Berlichingen,”
with which he is always free.

After eight more days we receive orders to go back. The
palmy days are over. Two big motor lorries take us away. They
are stacked high with planks. Nevertheless, Albert and I erect
on top our four-poster bed complete with blue silk canopy,
mattress, and two lace coverlets. And behind it at the head is
stowed a bag full of choicest edibles. We often dip into it, and
the tough ham sausages, the tins of liver sausages, the con-
serves, the boxes of cigarettes rejoice our hearts. Each man has
a bag to himself.

Kropp and I have rescued two big red arm-chairs as well.
They stand inside the bed, and we sprawl back in them as in a
theatre box. Above us swells the silken cover like a baldaquin.
Each man has a long cigar in his mouth. And thus from aloft
we survey the scene.
176 Erich Maria Remarque

Between us stands a parrot cage that we found for the cat.
She is coming with us, and lies in the cage before her saucer of
meat, and purrs.

Slowly the lorries roll down the road. We sing. Behind us
shells are sending up fountains from the now utterly aban-
doned village.

A few days later we are sent to evacuate a village. On the way
we meet the fleeing inhabitants trundling their goods and
chattels along with them in wheelbarrows, in perambula-
tors, and on their backs. Their figures are bent, their faces
full of grief, despair, haste, and resignation. The children
hold on to their mothers’ hands, and often an older girl leads
the little ones who stumble onward and are for ever looking
back. A few carry miserable-looking dolls. All are silent as
they pass us by.

We are marching in column; the French certainly will not
fire on a town in which there are still inhabitants. But a few
minutes later the air screams, the earth heaves, cries ring out;
a shell has landed among our rear squad. We scatter and fling
ourselves down on the ground, but at that moment I feel the
instinctive alertness leave me which hitherto has always made
me do unconsciously the right thing under fire; the thought
leaps up with a terrible throttling fear: “You are lost”™—and
the next moment a blow sweeps like a whip over my left leg.
I hear Albert cry out; he is beside me.

“Quick, up, Albert!” I yell, for we are lying unsheltered in
the open field.

He staggers up and runs. I keep beside him. We have to get
over a hedge; it is higher than we are. Kropp seizes a branch,
I heave him up by the leg, he cries out, I give him a swing and
All Quiet on the Western Front 177

he flies over. With one bound I follow him and fall into a ditch
that lies behind the hedge.

Our faces are smothered with duck-weed and mud, but the
cover is good. So we wade in up to our necks. Whenever a
shell whistles we duck our heads under the water. After we
have done this a dozen times, I am exhausted.

“Let’s get away, or I'll fall in and drown,” groans Albert.

“Where has it got you?” I ask him.

“In the knee I think.”

“Can you run?”

“I think 2

“Then out!”

 

We make for the ditch beside the road, and stooping, run
along it. The shelling follows us. The road leads towards the
munition dump. If that goes up there won’t be so much as a
boot-lace left of us. So we change our plan and run diagonally
across country. j

Albert begins to drag. “You go, I'll come on after,” he says,
and throws himself down.

I seize him by the arm and shake him. “Up, Albert, if once
you lie down you'll never get any farther. Quick, I'll hold you

»

up.

At last we reach a small dug-out. Kropp pitches in and I
bandage him up. The shot is just a little above his knee. Then
I take a look at myself. My trousers are bloody and my arm,
too. Albert binds up my wound with his field dressing. Al-
ready he is no longer able to move his leg, and we both won-
der how we managed to get this far. Fear alone made it
possible; we should have run even if our feet had been shot
off;—we would have run on the stumps.

I can still crawl a little. I call out to a passing ambulance
wagon which picks us up. It is full of wounded. There is an
178 Erich Maria Remarque

army medical lance-corporal with it who sticks an anti-tetanus
needle into our chests.

At the dressing station we arrange matters so that we lie
side by side. They give us a thin soup which we spoon down
greedily and scornfully, because we are accustomed to better
times but are hungry all the same.

“Now for home, Albert,” I say.

“Let’s hope so,” he replies, “I only wish I knew what I've
got.”

The pain increases. The bandages burn like fire. We drink
and drink, one glass of water after another.

“How far above the knee am I hit?” asks Kropp.

“At least four inches, Albert,” I answer. Actually it is per-
haps one.

“I've made up my mind,” he says after a while, “if they take
off my leg, I'll put an end to it. I won't go through life as a
cripple.”

So we lie there with our thoughts and wait.

In the evening we are hauled on to the chopping-block. I am
frightened and think quickly what I ought to do; for everyone
knows that the surgeons in the dressing stations amputate on
the slightest provocation. Under the great business that is
much simpler than complicated patching. I think of Kemm-
erich. Whatever happens I will not let them chloroform me,
even if I have to crack a couple of their skulls.

It is all right. The surgeon pokes around in the wound and a
blackness comes before my eyes. “Don’t carry on so,” he says
gruffly, and hacks away. The instruments gleam in the bright
light like marvelous animals. The pain is insufferable. Two or-
derlies hold my arms fast, but I break loose with one of them
All Quiet on the Western Front 179

and try to crash into the surgeon’s spectacles just as he notices
and springs back. “Chloroform the scoundrel,” he roars madly.

Then I become quiet. “Pardon me, Herr Doctor, I will keep
still but do not chloroform me.”

“Well now,” he cackles and takes up his instrument again.
He is a fair fellow, not more than thirty years old, with scars
and disgusting gold spectacles. Now I see that he is torment-
ing me, he is merely raking about in the wound and looking
up surreptitiously at me over his glasses. My hands squeeze
around the grips, I'll kick the bucket before he will get a
squeak out of me.

He has fished out a piece of shell and tosses it to me. Appar-
ently he is pleased at my self-control, for he now sets my leg
carefully in splints and says: “To-morrow you'll be off home.”
Then I am put in plaster. When I am back again with Kropp
I tell him apparently a hospital train comes in tomorrow
morning.

“We must work the army medical sergeant-major so that
we can keep together, Albert.”

I manage to slip the sergeant-major two of my cigars with
belly-bands, and then tip the word to him. He smells the ci-
gars and says: “Have you got any more of them?”

“Another good handful,” I say, “and my comrade,” I point
to Kropp, “he has some as well. We might possibly be glad to
hand them to you out of the window of the hospital train in
the morning.”

He understands, of course, smells them once again and says:
“Done.”

We cannot get a minute's sleep all night. One of them sings
hymns in a high cracked tenor before he begins to gurgle.
Another has crept out of his bed to the window. He lies in
front of it as though he wants to look out for the last time.
180 Erich Maria Remarque

Our stretchers stand on the platform. We wait for the train. It
rains and the station has no roof. Our blankets are thin. We
have waited already two hours.

The sergeant-major looks after us like a mother. Although
I feel pretty bad I do not let our scheme out of my mind. Casu-
ally I let him see the packet and give him one cigar in ad-
vance. In exchange the sergeant-major covers us over with a
waterproof sheet.

“Albert, old man,” I suddenly bethink myself, “our four-

2»

 

poster and the cat

“And the club chairs,” he adds.

Yes, the club chairs with red plush. In the evening we used
to sit in them like lords, and intended later on to let them out
by the hour. One cigarette per hour. It might have turned into
a regular business, a real good living.

“And our bags of grub, too, Albert.”

We grow melancholy. We might have made some use of the
things. If only the train left one day later Kat would be sure to
find us and bring us the stuff.

What damned hard luck! In our bellies there is gruel, mean
hospital stuff, and in our bags roast pork. But we are so weak
that we cannot work up any more excitement about it.

The stretchers are sopping wet by the time the train arrives
in the morning. The sergeant-major sees to it that we are put
in the same car. There is a crowd of red-cross nurses. Kropp is
stowed in below. I am lifted up and told to get into the bed
above him.

“Good God!” I exclaim suddenly.

“What is it?” asks the sister.
All Quiet on the Western Front 181

I cast a glance at the bed. It is covered with clean snow-
white linen, that even has got the marks of the iron still on it.
And my shirt has gone six weeks without being washed and is
terribly muddy.

“Can’t you get in by yourself?” asks the sister gently.

“Why yes,” I say in a sweat, “but take off the bed cover
first.”

“What for?”

I feel like a pig. Must I get in there?—“It will get

 

ml
hesitate.
“A little bit dirty?” she suggests helpfully. “That doesn’t

matter, we will wash it again afterwards.”

 

“No, no, not that " I say excitedly. I am not equal to
such overwhelming refinement.

“When you have been lying out there in the trenches, surely
we can wash a sheet,” she goes on.

I look at her, she is young and crisp, spotless and neat, like
everything here; a man cannot realize that it isn’t for officers
only, and feels himself strange and in some way even alarmed.

All the same the woman is a tormentor, she is going to force

 

me to say it. “It is only "I try again, surely she must
know what I mean.

“What is it then?”

“Because of the lice,” I bawl out at last.

She laughs. “Well, they must have a good day for once,
too.”

Now I don’t care any more. I scramble into bed and pull up
the covers.

A hand gropes over the bed-cover. The sergeant-major. He
goes off with the cigars.

An hour later we notice we are moving.
182 Erich Maria Remarque

I wake up during the night. Kropp is restless too. The train
rides easily over the rails. I cannot realize it all yet; a bed, a
train, home. “Albert!” I whisper.

“Yes T

“Do you know where the latrine is?”

“The door is on the right, I think.”

“I'm going to have a look.” It is dark, I grope for the edge

 

of the bed and cautiously try to slide down. But my foot finds
no support, I begin to slip, the plaster leg is no help, and with
a crash I lie on the floor.

“Damn!” I say.

“Have you bumped yourself?” asks Kropp.

“You could hear that well enough for yourself,” I growl,

»

“my head

 

A door opens at the rear of the car. The sister comes with a
light and looks at me.

“He has fallen out of bed 7

She feels my pulse and smooths my forehead. “You haven't

 

any fever, though.”
“No,” I agree.
“Have you been dreaming then?” she asks.
“Perhaps ” I evade. The interrogation starts again. She

looks at me with her clear eyes, and the more wonderful and

 

sweet she is the less am I able to tell her what I want.

I am lifted up into bed again. That will be all right. As soon
as she goes I must try to climb down again. If she were an old
woman, it might be easier to say what a man wants, but she is
so very young, at the most twenty-five, it can’t be done, I can-
not possibly tell her.

Then Albert comes to my rescue, he is not bashful, it makes
All Quiet on the Western Front 183
no difference to him who is upset. He calls to the sister. She

turns round. “Sister, he wants ” but no more does Albert

 

know how to express it modestly and decently. Out there we
All at once

 

say it in a single word, but here, to such a lady
he remembers his school days and finishes hastily: “He wants
to leave the room, sister.”

“Ah!” says the sister, “but he shouldn’t climb out of his bed
with plaster bandage. What do you want then?” she says turn-
ing to me.

I'am in mortal terror at this turn, for I haven't any idea what
the things are called professionally. She comes to my help.

“Little or big?”

Shocking business! I sweat like a pig and say shyly: “Well,

”»

only quite a little one

 

At any rate it produces the effect.

I get a bottle. After a few hours I am no longer the only one,
and by morning we are quite accustomed to it and ask for
what we want without any false modesty.

The train travels slowly. Sometimes it halts and the dead
are unloaded. It halts often.

Albert is feverish. I don’t feel too bad; I have some pain, but
the worst of it is that apparently there are still lice under the
plaster bandage. They itch terribly, and I cannot scratch myself.

We sleep through the days. The country glides quietly past
the window. The third night we reach Herbesthal. I hear from
the sister that Albert is to be put off at the next station be-
cause of his fever. “How far does the train go?” I ask.

“To Cologne.”

“Albert,” I say “we stick together; you see.”

On the sister’s next round I hold my breath and press it up
into my head. My face swells and turns red. She stops. “Are
you in pain?”
184 Erich Maria Remarque

“Yes,” I groan, “all of a sudden.”

She gives me a thermometer and goes on. I would not have
been under Kat's tuition if I did not know what to do now.
These army thermometers are not made for old soldiers. All
one has to do is to drive the quicksilver up and then it stays
without falling again.

I stick the thermometer under my arm at a slant, and flip it
steadily with my forefinger. Then I give it a shake. I send it up
to 100.2°. But that is not enough. A match held cautiously
near to it brings it up to 101.6°.

As the sister comes back, I blow myself out, breathe in
short gasps, goggle at her with vacant eyes, toss about rest-
lessly, and mutter in a whisper: “I can’t bear it any longer

 

She notes me down on a slip of paper. I know perfectly well
my plaster bandage will not be reopened if it can be avoided.
Albert and I are put off together.

We are in the same room in a Catholic Hospital. That is a
piece of luck, the Catholic infirmaries are noted for their good
treatment and good food. The hospital has been filled up from
our train, there are a great many bed cases amongst them. We
do not get examined to-day because there are too few sur-
geons. The flat trolleys with the rubber wheels pass continu-
ally along the corridor, and always with someone stretched at
full length upon them. A damnable position, stretched out
full length like that;—the only time it is good is when one is
asleep.

The night is very disturbed. No one can sleep. Toward
morning we doze a little. I wake up just as it grows light. The
doors stand open and I hear voices from the corridor. The oth-
ers wake up too. One fellow who has been there a couple of
All Quiet on the Western Front 185

days already explains it to us: “Up here in the corridor every
morning the sisters say prayers. They call it Morning Devo-
tion. And so that you can get your share, they leave the door
open.”

No doubt it is well meant, but it gives us aches in our heads
and bones.

“Such an absurdity!” I say, “just when a man dropped off to
sleep.”

“All the light cases are up here, that’s why they do it here,”
he replies.

Albert groans. I get furious and call out: “Be quiet out there!”

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.

“We are saying prayers, that is why the door is open,” she
responds.

”»

 

“But we want to go on sleeping

“Prayer is better than sleeping,” she stands there and smiles
innocently. “And it is seven o’clock already.”

Albert groans again. “Shut the door,” I snort.

She is quite disconcerted. Apparently she cannot under-
stand. “But we are saying prayers for you too.”

“Shut the door, anyway.”

She disappears, leaving the door open. The intoning of the
litany proceeds.

I feel savage, and say: “I'm going to count up to three. If it
doesn’t stop before then I'll let something fly.”

“Me too,” says another.

I count up to five. Then I take hold of a bottle, aim, and
heave it through the door into the corridor. It smashes into a
thousand pieces. The praying stops. A swarm of sisters appear
and reproach us in concert.
186 Erich Maria Remarque

“Shut the door!” we yell.

They withdraw. The little one who came first is the last to
go. “Heathen,” she chirps but shuts the door all the same. We
have won.

At noon the hospital inspector arrives and abuses us. He
threatens us with clink and all the rest of it. But a hospital
inspector is just the same as a commissariat inspector, or any
one else who wears a long sword and shoulder straps, but is
really a clerk, and is never considered even by a recruit as a real
officer. So we let him talk. What could they do to us any-

 

way

“Who threw the bottle?” he asks.

Before I can think whether I should report myself, someone
says: “I did.”

A man with a bristling beard sits up. Everyone is excited;
why should he report himself?

“You?”

“Yes. I was annoyed because we were waked up unnecessar-
ily and lost my senses so that I did not know what I was
doing.”

He talks like a book.

“What is your name?”

“Reinforcement-Reservist Josef Hamacher.”

The inspector departs.

We are all curious. “But why did you say you did it? It
wasn't you at all.”

He grins. “That doesn’t matter. I have a shooting license.”

Then of course, we all understand. Whoever has a shooting
license can do just whatever he pleases.

“Yes,” he explains. “I got a crack in the head and they pre-
All Quiet on the Western Front 187

sented me with a certificate to say that I was periodically not
responsible for my actions. Ever since then I've had a grand
time. No one dares to annoy me. And nobody does anything
to me.

“I reported myself because the shot amused me. If they
open the door again to-morrow we will pitch another.”

We are overjoyed. With Josef Hamacher in our midst we
can now risk anything.

Then come the soundless, flat trollies to take us away.

The bandages are stuck fast. We bellow like steers.

There are eight men in our room. Peter, a curly black-haired
fellow, has the worst injury;—a severe lung wound. Franz
Wichter, alongside him, has a shot in the arm which didn’t
look too bad at first. But the third night he calls out to us,
telling us to ring, he thinks he has a haemorrhage.

I ring loudly. The night sister does not come. We have been
making rather heavy demands on her during the night, be-
cause we have all been freshly bandaged, and so have a good
deal of pain. One wants his leg placed so, another so, a third
wants water, a fourth wants her to shake his pillow;—in the
end the buxom old body grumbled bad-temperedly and
slammed the doors. Now no doubt she thinks it is something
of the same sort and so she is not coming.

We wait. Then Franz says: “Ring again.”

I do so. Still she does not put in an appearance. In our wing
there is only one night sister, perhaps she has something to do
in one of the other rooms. “Franz, are you quite sure you are
bleeding?” I ask. “Otherwise we shall be getting cursed again.”

“The bandage is wet. Can’t anybody make a light?”

That cannot be done either. The switch is by the door and
188 Erich Maria Remarque

none of us can stand up. I hold my thumb against the button
of the bell till it becomes numb. Perhaps the sister has fallen
asleep. They certainly have a great deal to do and are all over-
worked day after day. And added to that is the everlasting
praying.

“Should we smash a bottle?” asks Josef Hamacher of the
shooting license.

“She wouldn't hear that any more than the bell.”

At last the door opens. The old lady appears, mumbling.
When she perceives Franz’s trouble she begins to bustle, and
says: “Why did not someone say I was wanted?”

“We did ring. And none of us here can walk.”

He has been bleeding badly and she binds him up. In the
morning we look at his face, it has become sharp and yellow,
whereas the evening before he looked almost healthy. Now a

sister comes oftener.

Sometimes there are red-cross voluntary aid sisters. They are
pleasant, but often rather unskilled. They frequently give us
pain when re-making our beds, and then are so frightened
that they hurt us still more.

The nuns are more reliable. They know how they must take
hold of us, but we would be better pleased if they were some-
what more cheerful. A few of them have real spirit, they are
superb. There is no one but would do anything for Sister Lib-
ertine, this marvelous sister, who spreads good cheer through
the whole wing even when she can only be seen in the dis-
tance. And there are others like her. We would go through fire
for her. A man cannot really complain, here he is treated by
the nuns exactly like a civilian. And just to think of a garrison

hospital gives one the creeps.
All Quiet on the Western Front 189

Franz Wichter does not regain his strength. One day he is
taken away and does not come back. Josef Hamacher knows
all about it: “We shan’t see him again. They have put him in
the Dead Room.”

“What do you mean, Dead Room?” asks Kropp.

“Well, Dying Room 7

“What is that, then?”

“A little room at the corner of the building. Whoever is

 

about to kick the bucket is put in there. There are two beds in
it. It is generally called the Dying Room.”

“But what do they do that for?”

“They don’t have so much work to do after-wards. It is
more convenient, too, because it lies right beside the lift to
the mortuary. Perhaps they do it for the sake of the others also,
so that no one in the ward dies in sympathy. And they can
look after him better, too, if he is by himself.”

“But what about him?”

Josef shrugs his shoulders. “Usually he doesn’t take much
notice any more.”

“Does everybody know about it then?”

“Anyone who has been here long enough knows, of course.”

In the afternoon Franz Wichter’s bed has a fresh occupant. A
couple of days later they take the new man away, too. Josef
makes a significant glance. We see many come and go.

Often relatives sit by the beds and weep or talk softly and
awkwardly. One old woman will not go away, but she cannot
stay there the whole night through. The next morning she
comes very early, but not early enough; for when she goes up to
the bed, someone else is in it already. She has to go the mortu-
ary. The apples that she has brought with her she gives to us.
190 Erich Maria Remarque

And then little Peter begins to get worse. His temperature
chart looks bad, and one day the flat trolley stands beside his
bed. “Where to?” he asks.

“To the bandaging ward.”

He is lifted out. But the sister makes the mistake of remov-
ing his tunic from the hook and putting it on the trolley, too,
so that she should not have to make two journeys. Peter un-
derstands immediately and tries to roll off the trolley. “I'm
stopping here!”

They push him back. He cries out feebly with his shattered
lung: “I won't go to the Dying Room.”

“But we are going to the bandaging ward.”

“Then what do you want my tunic for?” He can speak no
more. Hoarse, agitated, he whispers: “Stopping here!”

They do not answer but wheel him out. At the door he tries
to raise himself up. His black curly head sways, his eyes are
full of tears. “I will come back again! I will come back again!”
he cries.

The door shuts. We are all excited; but we say nothing. At
last Josef says: “Many a man has said that. Once a man is in

there, he never comes through.”

I am operated on and vomit for two days. My bones will not
grow together, so the surgeons’ secretary says. Another fel-
low’s have grown crooked; his are broken again. It is damna-
ble.

Among our new arrivals there are two young soldiers with
flat feet. The chief surgeon discovers them on his rounds, and
is overjoyed. “We'll soon put that right,” he tells them, “we
will just do a small operation, and then you will have perfectly
sound feet. Enter them down, sister.”
All Quiet on the Western Front I91

As soon as he is gone, Josef, who knows everything, warns
them: “Don’t you let him operate on you! That is a special
scientific stunt of the old boy's. He goes absolutely crazy
whenever he can get hold of anyone to do it on. He operates
on you for flat feet, and there’s no mistake, you don’t have
them anymore; you have club feet instead, and have to walk
all the rest of your life on sticks.”

“What should a man do, then?” asks one of them.

“Say No. You are here to be cured of your wound, not your
flat feet. Did you have any trouble with them in the field? No,
well, there you are! At present you can still walk, but if once
the old boy gets you under the knife you'll be cripples. What
he wants is little dogs to experiment with, so the war is a glo-
rious time for him, as it is for all the surgeons. You take a look
down below at the staff; there are a dozen fellows hobbling
around that he has operated on. A lot of them have been here
all the time since "fourteen and fifteen. Not a single one of
them can walk better than he could before, almost all of them
worse, and most only with plaster legs. Every six months he
catches them again and breaks their bones afresh, and every
time is going to be the successful one. You take my word, he
won't dare to do it if you say No.”

“Ach, man,” says one of the two wearily, “better your feet
than your brain-box. There’s no telling what you'll get if you
go back out there again. They can do with me just as they
please, so long as I get back home. Better to have a club foot
than be dead.”

The other, a young fellow like ourselves, won't have it done.
The next morning the old man has the two hauled up and
lectures and jaws at them so long that in the end they consent.
What else could they do?—They are mere privates, and he is
a big bug. They are brought back chloroformed and plastered.
192 Erich Maria Remarque

It is going badly with Albert. They have taken him and ampu-
tated his leg. The whole leg has been taken off from the thigh.
Now he will hardly speak any more. Once he says he will shoot
himself the first time he can get hold of his revolver again.

A new convoy arrives. Our room gets two blind men. One
of them is a very youthful musician. The sisters never have a
knife with them when they feed him; he has already snatched
one from a sister. But in spite of this caution there is an inci-
dent. In the evening, while he is being fed, the sister is called
away, and leaves the plate with the fork on his table. He
gropes for the fork, seizes it and drives it with all his force
against his heart, then he snatches up a shoe and strikes with
it against the handle as hard as he can. We call for help and
three men are necessary to take the fork away from him. The
blunt prongs had already penetrated deep. He abuses us all
night so that no one can go to sleep. In the morning he has
lock-jaw.

Again beds are empty. Day after day goes by with pain and
fear, groans and death gurgles. Even the Death Room is no
use any more, it is too small; fellows die during the night in
our room. They go even faster than the sisters can cope with
them.

But one day the door flies open, the flat trolley rolls in, and
there on the stretcher, pale, thin, upright and triumphant,
with his shaggy head of curls sits Peter. Sister Libertine with
beaming looks pushes him over to his former bed. He is back
from the Dying Room. We have long supposed him dead.

He looks round: “What do you say now?”

And Josef has to admit that it is the first time he has ever

known of such a thing.
All Quiet on the Western Front 193

Gradually a few of us are allowed to get up. And I am given
crutches to hobble around on. But I do not make much use of
them; I cannot bear Albert’s gaze as I move about the room.
His eyes always follow me with such a strange look. So I some-
times escape to the corridor;—there I can move about more
freely.

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; underneath the wound a basin is placed into
which drips the pus. Every two or three hours the vessel is
emptied. Other men lie in stretching bandages with heavy
weights hanging from the end of the bed. I see intestine
wounds that are constantly full of excreta. The surgeon’s clerk
shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed hip-
bones, knees and shoulders.

A man cannot realize 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
194 Erich Maria Remarque

blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hun-
dreds 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 an-
other, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, in-
nocently 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 genera-
tion 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 busi-
ness has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our
knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen after-

wards? And what shall come out of us?

The oldest man in our room is Lewandowski. He is forty, and
has already lain ten months in the hospital with a severe ab-
dominal wound. Just in the last few weeks he has improved
sufficiently to be able to hobble about doubled up.

For some days past he has been in great excitement. His
wife has written to him from the little home in Poland where
she lives, telling him that she has saved up enough money to
pay for the fare and is coming to see him.

She is already on the way and may arrive any day. Lewan-
dowski has lost his appetite, he even gives away red cabbage
and sausage after he has had a couple of mouthfuls. He goes
round the room perpetually with the letter. Everyone has al-
ready read it a dozen times, the post-marks have been exam-
All Quiet on the Western Front 195

ined heaven knows how often, the address is hardly legible
any longer for spots of grease and thumb-marks, and in the
end what is sure to happen, happens. Lewandowski develops a
fever, and has to go back to bed.

He has not seen his wife for two years. In the meantime she
has given birth to a child, whom she is bringing with her. But
something else occupies Lewandowski’s thoughts. He had
hoped to get permission to go out when his old woman came;
for obviously seeing is all very well, but when a man gets his
wife again after such a long time, if at all possible, a man
wants something else besides.

Lewandowski has discussed it all with us at great length; in
the army there are no secrets about such things. And what's
more, nobody finds anything objectionable in it. Those of us
who are already able to go out have told him of a couple of
very good spots in the town, parks and squares, where he
would not be disturbed; one of us even knows of a little room.

But what is the use, there Lewandowski lies in bed with his
troubles. Life holds no more joy for him if he has to forgo this
affair. We console him and promise to get over the difficulty
somehow or other.

The next afternoon his wife appears, a tousled little woman
with anxious, quick eyes like a bird, in a sort of black crinkly
mantilla with ribbons; heaven knows where she inherited the
thing.

She murmurs something softly and stands shyly in the
doorway. It terrifies her that there are six of us men present.

“Well, Marja,” says Lewandowski, and gulps dangerously
with his Adam’s apple “you can come in all right, they won't
hurt you.”

She goes round and proffers each of us her hand. Then she
produces the child, which in the intervals has done something
196 Erich Maria Remarque

in its napkin. From a large handbag embroidered with beads
she takes out a clean one and makes the child fresh and pre-
sentable. This dispels her first embarrassment, and the two
begin to talk.

Lewandowski is very fidgety, every now and then he squints
across at us most unhappily with his round goggle eyes.

This time is favourable, the doctor’s visit is over, at the
most one of the sisters might come in. So one of us goes out to
prospect. He comes back and nods. “Not a soul to be seen.
Now's your chance, Johann, set to.”

The two speak together in an undertone. The woman turns
a little red and looks embarrassed. We grin good-naturedly
and make pooh-poohing gestures, what does it matter! The
devil take all conventions, they were made for other times;
here lies the carpenter Johann Lewandowski, a soldier shot to
a cripple, and there is his wife; who knows when he will see
her again? He wants to have her, and he should have her, good.

Two men stand at the door to forestall the sisters and keep
them occupied if they chance to come along. They agree to
stand guard for a quarter of an hour or thereabouts.

Lewandowski can only lie on his side, so one of us props a
couple of pillows against his side, Albert gets the child to
hold, we all turn round a bit, the black mantilla disappears
under the bed-clothes, we make a great clatter and play skat
noisily.

All goes well. I hold a club solo with four jacks which
nearly goes the round. In the process we almost forget Lewan-
dowski. After a while the child begins to squall, although Al-
bert, in desperation, rocks it to and fro. There is a bit of
creaking and rustling, and as we look up casually we see that
the child has the bottle in its mouth and is back again with its

mother. The business is over.
All Quiet on the Western Front 197

We now feel ourselves like one big family, the woman is
happy, and Lewandowski lies there sweating and beaming.

He unpacks the embroidered handbag, and some good sau-
sages come to light; Lewandowski takes up the knife with a
flourish and saws the meat into slices.

With a handsome gesture he waves toward us—and the little
woman goes from one to another and smiles at us and hands
round the sausage; she now looks quite handsome. We call her
Mother, she is pleased and shakes up our pillows for us.

After a few weeks I have to go each morning to the massage
department. There my leg is harnessed up and made to move.
The arm has healed long since.

New convoys arrive from the line. The bandages are no lon-
ger made of cloth, but of white crépe paper. Rag bandages
have become scarce at the front.

Albert's stump heals well. The wound is almost closed. In a
few weeks he should go off to an institute for artificial limbs.
He continues not to talk much, and is much more solemn
than formerly. He often breaks off in his speech and stares in
front of him. If he were not here with us he would have shot
himself long ago. But now he is over the worst of it, and he
often looks on while we play skat.

I get convalescent leave.

My mother does not want to let me go away. She is feeble.
It is all much worse than it was last time.

Then I am recalled to my regiment and return once more to
the line.

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

 

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 over-
come. It is as though formerly we were coins of different prov-
All Quiet on the Western Front 199

inces; 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.

It is a great brotherhood, which adds something of the
good-fellowship of the folk-song, of the feeling of solidarity of
convicts, and of the desperate loyalty to one another of men
condemned to death, to a condition of life arising out of the
midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death—
seeking in a wholly unpathetic way a fleeting enjoyment of
the hours as they come. If one wants to appraise it, it is at once
heroic and banal-—but who wants to do that?

It is this, for example, that makes Tjaden spoon down his
ham-and-pea soup in such tearing haste when an enemy at-
tack is reported, simply because he cannot be sure that in an
hours time he will be alive. We have discussed it at length,
whether it is right or not to do so. Kat condemns it, because,
he says, a man has to reckon with the possibility of an ab-
dominal wound, and that is more dangerous on a full stomach
than on an empty one.

Such things are real problems, they are serious matters to
us, they cannot be otherwise. Here, on the borders of death,
life follows an amazingly simply course, it is limited to what
is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep;—in that
besides our primitiveness and our survival. Were we more
subtly differentiated we must long since have gone mad, have
deserted, or have fallen. As in a polar expedition, every expres-
sion of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and
is absolutely focused on that. All else is banished because it
would consume energies unnecessarily. That is the only way to
save ourselves. In the quiet hours when the puzzling reflection
of former days like a blurred mirror, projects beyond me the
200 Erich Maria Remarque

figure of my present existence, I often sit over against myself,
as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active
principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this
form. All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply
one continual watch against the menace of death;—it has
transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us
the weapon of instinct—it has reinforced us with dullness, so
that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would
overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought—it has
awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape
the abyss of solitude—it has lent us the indifference of wild
creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in
every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the on-
slaught of nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence
of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike
out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and
terrible yearning flares up.

Those are the dangerous moments. They show us that the
adjustment is only artificial, that it is not simple rest, but
sharpest struggle for rest. In the outward form of our life we
are hardly distinguishable from Bushmen; 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. We are little flames poorly
sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and
All Quiet on the Western Front 201

madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.
Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that en-
circles 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.

There is the mad story of Detering.

He was one of those who kept himself to himself. His mis-
fortune was that he saw a cherry tree in a garden. We were just
coming back from the front line, and at a turning of the road
near our billets, marvellous in the morning twilight, stood
this cherry tree before us. It had no leaves, but was one white
mass of blossom.

In the evening Detering was not to be seen. Then at last he
came back and had a couple of branches of cherry blossom in
his hand. We made fun of him, and asked whether he was
going to a wedding. He made no answer, but lay down on his
bed. During the night I heard him making a noise, he seemed
to be packing. I sensed something amiss and went over to
him. He made out it was nothing, and I said to him: “Don’t
do anything silly, Detering.”

“Ach, why—it’s merely that I can’t sleep——"

“What did you pick the cherry branches for?”

“Surely I can pick cherry blossom if I want to!” he replied
evasively—and after a while: “I have a big orchard with
cherry trees at home. When they are in blossom, from the
hay loft they look like one single sheet, so white. It is just
the time.”
202 Erich Maria Remarque

“Perhaps you will get leave soon. You may even be sent
back as a farmer.”

He nodded but he was far away. When these peasants are
excited they have a curious expression, a mixture of cow and
yearning god, half stupid and half rapt. In order to turn him
away from his thoughts I asked him for a piece of bread. He
gave it to me without a murmur. That was suspicious, for he
is usually tight-fisted. So I stayed awake. Nothing happened;
in the morning he was as usual.

Apparently he had noticed that I had been watching him;—
but the second morning he was gone. I noticed it, but said
nothing, in order to give him time; he might perhaps get
through. Various fellows have already got into Holland.

But at roll call he was missed. A week after we heard that
he had been caught by the field gendarmes, those despicable
military police. He had headed toward Germany, that was
hopeless, of course—and, of course, he did everything else just
as idiotically. Anyone might have known that his flight was
only homesickness and a momentary aberration. But what
does a court-martial a hundred miles behind the front-line
know about it? We have heard nothing more of Detering.

But sometimes it broke out in other ways, this danger, these
pent-up things, as from an overheated boiler. It will be enough
to tell how Berger met his end.

Our trenches have now for some time been shot to pieces,
and we have an elastic line, so that there is practically no lon-
ger any proper trench warfare. When attack and counter-
attack have waged backwards and forwards there remains a
broken line and a bitter struggle from crater to crater. The
front-line has been penetrated, and everywhere small groups
All Quiet on the Western Front 203

have established themselves, the fight is carried on from clus-
ters of shell-holes.

We are in a crater, the English are coming down obliquely,
they are turning our flank and working in behind us. We are
surrounded. It is not easy to surrender, fog and smoke hang
over us, no one would recognize that we wanted to give our-
selves up, and perhaps we don’t want to, a man doesn’t even
know himself at such moments. We hear the explosions of the
hand-grenades coming towards us. Our machine-gun sweeps
over the semicircle in front of us. The cooling-water evapo-
rates, we hastily pass round the case, every man pisses in it,
and thus we again have water, and are able to continue firing.
But behind us the attack crashes ever nearer.

A few minutes and we are lost.

Then, at closest range, a second machine-gun bursts out. It
is set up in a crater alongside us; Berger has fetched it, and
now the counter-attack comes over from behind; we are set
free and make contact with the rear.

Afterwards, as we lie in comparatively good cover, one of
the food-carriers reports that a couple of hundred yards dis-
tant there lies a wounded messenger-dog.

“Where?” asks Berger.

The other describes the place to him. Berger goes off either
to fetch the beast in or to shoot it. Six months ago he would
not have cared, he would have been reasonable. We try to pre-
vent him. Then, as he goes off grimly, all we can say is: “You're
mad,” and let him go. For these cases of front-line madness
become dangerous if one is not able to fling the man to the
ground and hold him fast. And Berger is six feet and the most
powerful man in the company.

He is absolutely mad for he has to pass through the barrage;
but this lightning that lowers somewhere above us has struck
204 Erich Maria Remarque

him and made him demented. It affects others so that they
begin to rave, to run away—there was one man who even tried
to dig himself into the ground with hands, feet, and teeth.

It is true, such things are often simulated, but the pretence
itself is a symptom. Berger, who means to finish off the dog, is
carried away with a wound in the pelvis, and one of the fellows
who carry him gets a bullet in the leg while doing it.

Miiller is dead. Someone shot him point-blank in the stomach
with a Verey light. He lived for half an hour, quite conscious,
and in terrible pain.

Before he died he handed over his pocket-book to me, and
bequeathed me his boots—the same that he once inherited
from Kemmerich. I wear them, for they fit me quite well.
After me Tjaden will get them, I have promised them to him.

We have been able to bury Miiller, but he is not likely to
remain long undisturbed. Our lines are falling back. There are
too many fresh English and American regiments over there.
There's too much corned beef and white wheaten bread. Too
many new guns. Too many aeroplanes.

But we are emaciated and starved. Our food is bad and
mixed up with so much substitute stuff that it makes us ill.
The factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy;—
dysentery dissolves our bowels. The latrine poles are always
densely crowded; the people at home ought to be shown these
grey, yellow, miserable, wasted faces here, these bent figures
from whose bodies the colic wrings out the blood, and who
with lips trembling and distorted with pain, grin at one an-

other and say:

 

“It is not much sense pulling up one’s trousers again
Our artillery is fired out, it has too few shells and the bar-
All Quiet on the Western Front 205

rels 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. 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.
There, if they do not amputate him, he sooner or later falls
into the hands of one of those staff surgeons who, with the
War Service Cross in his button-hole, says to him: “What, one
leg a bit short? If you have any pluck you don’t need to run at
the front. The man is A1. Dismiss!”

Kat tells a story that has travelled the whole length of the
front from the Vosges to Flanders;—of the staff surgeon who
reads the names on the list, and when a man comes before
him, without looking up, says: “Ar. We need soldiers up
there.” A fellow with a wooden leg comes up before him, the

staff surgeon again says A1 “And then,” Kat raises his

 

voice, “the fellow says to him: ‘I already have a wooden leg,
but when I go back again and they shoot off my head, then I
will get a wooden head made and become a staff surgeon.”
This answer tickles us all immensely.

There may be good doctors, and there are, lots of them; all
the same, every soldier some time during his hundreds of in-
spections falls into the clutches of one of these countless hero-
grabbers who pride themselves on changing as many C3’s and
B3’s as possible into A1’s.
206 Erich Maria Remarque

There are many such stories, they are mostly far more bit-
ter. All the same, they have nothing to do with mutiny or
lead-swinging. They are merely honest and call a thing by its
name; for there is a very great deal of fraud, injustice, and
baseness in the army. It is nothing that regiment after regi-
ment returns again and again to the ever more hopeless strug-
gle, that attack follows attack along the weakening, retreating,
crumbling line.

From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon.
Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, more than any-
thing else embody for us the horror of war.

We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking
lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these
tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the
war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the
craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roar-
ing, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts
squashing the dead and the wounded—we shrivel up in our
thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms
are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches.

Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks—shattering, cor-
roding, death.

Dysentery, influenza, typhus—scalding, choking, death.

Trenches, hospitals, the common grave—there are no other

possibilities.

In one attack our Company Commander, Bertinck, falls. He
was one of those superb front-line officers who are foremost in
every hot place. He was with us for two years without being
wounded, so that something had to happen in the end.
All Quiet on the Western Front 207

We occupy a crater and get surrounded. The stink of petro-
leum or oil blows across with the fumes of powder. Two fel-
lows with a flame-thrower are seen, one carries the tin on his
back, the other has the hose in his hands from which the fire
spouts. If they get so near that they can reach us we are done
for, we cannot retreat yet.

We open fire on them. But they work nearer and things
begin to look bad. Bertinck is lying in the hole with us. When
he sees that we cannot hit them because under the sharp fire
we have to think too much about keeping under cover, he
takes a rifle, crawls out of the hole, and lying down propped
on his elbows, he takes aim. He fires—the same moment a
bullet smacks into him, they have got him. Still he lies and
aims again;—once he shifts and again takes aim; at last the
rifle cracks. Bertinck lets the gun drop and says: “Good,” and
slips back into the hole. The hindermost of the two flame-
throwers is hit, he falls, the hose slips away from the other
fellow, the fire squirts about on all sides and the man burns.

Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment
smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient
force to tear open Leer’s hip. Leer groans as he supports him-
self on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like
an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses.

What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathe-
matician at school.

The months pass by. The summer of 1918 is the most bloody
and the most terrible. The days stand like angels in blue and
gold, incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation. Every
man here knows that we are losing the war. Not much is said
208 Erich Maria Remarque

about it, we are falling back, we will not be able to attack
again after this big offensive, we have no more men and no
more ammunition.

Still the campaign goes on—the dying goes on

 

Summer of 1918—Never has life in its niggardliness
seemed to us so desirable as now;—the red poppies in the
meadows round our billets, the smooth beetles on the blades
of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, dim rooms, the black
mysterious trees of the twilight, the stars and the flowing wa-
ters, dreams and long sleep——O Life, life, life!

Summer of 1918—Never was so much silently suffered as
in the moment when we depart once again for the front-line.
Wild, tormenting rumours of an armistice and peace are in
the air, they lay hold on our hearts and make the return to the
front harder than ever.

Summer of 1918—Never was life in the line more bitter
and full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when
the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the
one thought: No! No! Not now! Not now at the last moment!

Summer of 1918—Breath of hope that sweeps over the
scorched fields, raging fever of impatience, of disappointment,
of the most agonizing terror of death, insensate question:
Why? Why do they make an end? And why do these rumours
of an end fly about?

There are so many airmen here, and they are so sure of them-
selves that they give chase to single individuals, just as though
they were hares. For every one German plane there come at
least five English and American. For one hungry, wretched
German soldier come five of the enemy, fresh and fit. For one
German army loaf there are fifty tins of canned beef over there.
All Quiet on the Western Front 209

We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are better and more ex-
perienced; we are simply crushed and driven back by over-
whelming superior forces.

Behind us lay rainy weeks—grey sky, grey fluid earth, grey
dying. If we go out, the rain at once soaks through our over-
coat and clothing;—and we remain wet all the time we are in
the line. We never get dry. Those who will wear high boots tie
sand bags round the tops so that the mud does not pour in so
fast. 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.

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow
the hail of splinters whips forth the child-like cries of the
wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into
silence.

Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of
rain. We do not know whether we still live.

Then the heat sinks heavily into our shell-holes like a jelly
fish, moist and oppressive and on one of these late summer
days, while bringing food, Kat falls. We two are alone. I
bind up his wound; his shin seems to be smashed. It has got
the bone, and Kat groans desperately: “At last—just at the

”

last

 

I comfort him. “Who knows how long this mess will go on

’

yet! Now you are saved

 

The wound begins to bleed fast. Kat cannot be left by him-
self while I try to find a stretcher. Anyway, I don’t know of a
stretcher-bearer’s post in the neighborhood.

Kat is not very heavy; so I take him up on my back and start
off to the dressing station with him.
210 Erich Maria Remarque

Twice we rest. He suffers acutely on the way. We do not
speak much. I have opened the collar of my tunic and breathe
heavily, I sweat and my face is swollen with the strain of car-
rying. All the same I urge him to let us go on, for the place is
dangerous.

“Shall we go on again Kat?”

“Must, Paul.”

“Then come.”

I raise him up, he stands on the uninjured leg and supports
himself against a tree. I take up the wounded leg carefully,
then he gives a jump and I take the knee of the sound leg also
under my arm.

The going is more difficult. Often a shell whistles across. I
go as quickly as I can, for the blood from Kat's wound drips to
the ground. We cannot shelter ourselves properly for the ex-
plosions; before we can take cover the danger is all over.

We lie down in a small hole to wait till the shelling is over.
I give Kat some tea from my water bottle. We smoke a ciga-
rette. “Well, Kat,” I say gloomily, “We are going to be sepa-
rated at last.”

He is silent and looks at me.

“Do you remember, Kat, how we commandeered the goose?
And how you brought me out of the barrage when I was still
a young recruit and was wounded for the first time? I cried
then. Kat, that is almost three years ago.”

He nods.

The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken
away I will not have one friend left.

“Kat, in any case we must see one another again, if it is
peace-time before you come back.”

“Do you think that I will be marked A1 again with this
leg?” he asks bitterly.
All Quiet on the Western Front 211

“With rest it will get better. The joint is quite sound. It
may get all right again.”

“Give me another cigarette,” he says.

“Perhaps we could do something together later on, Kat.” I
am very miserable, it is impossible that Kat—Kat my friend,
Kat with the drooping shoulders and the poor, thin mous-
tache, Kat, whom I know as I know no other man, Kat with
whom I have shared these years—it is impossible that perhaps
I shall not see Kat again.

“In any case give me your address at home, Kat. And here
is mine, I will write it down for you.”

I write his address in my pocket book. How forlorn I am
already, though he still sits here beside me. Couldn’t I shoot
myself quickly in the foot so as to be able to go with him.

Suddenly Kat gurgles and turns green and yellow, “Let us
go on,” he stammers.

I jump up, eager to help him, I take him up and start off at
a run, a slow, steady pace, so as not to jolt his leg too much.

My throat is parched; everything dances red and black be-
fore my eyes, I stagger on doggedly and pitilessly and at last
reach the dressing station.

There I drop down on my knees, but have still enough
strength to fall on to the side where Kat's sound leg is. After
a few minutes I straighten myself up again. My legs and my
hands tremble. I have trouble in finding my water bottle, to
take a pull. My lips tremble as I try to think. But I smile—
Kat is saved.

After a while I begin to sort out the confusion of voices that
falls on my ears.

“You might have spared yourself that,” says an orderly.

I look at him without comprehending.

He points to Kat. “He is stone dead.”
212 Erich Maria Remarque

I do not understand him. “He has been hit in the shin,”
I say.

The orderly stands still. “That as well.”

I turn round. My eyes are still dulled, the sweat breaks out
on me again, it runs over my eyelids. I wipe it away and peer
at Kat. He lies still. “Fainted,” I say quickly.

The orderly whistles softly. “I know better than that. He is
dead. I'll lay any money on that.”

I shake my head: “Not possible. Only ten minutes ago I was
talking to him. He has fainted.”

Kat's hands are warm, I pass my hand under his shoulders
in order to rub his temples with some tea. I feel my fingers
become moist. As I draw them away from behind his head,
” The orderly whistles once

 

they are bloody. “You see
more through his teeth.

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.

Then I know nothing more.
Twelve

 

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 again
proves an illusion, then they will break up; hope is high, it
cannot be taken away again without an upheaval. If there is
not peace, then there will be revolution.

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

Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that
meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings—greed of
life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of de-
liverance. But no aims.

Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and
the strength of our experience 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.
214 Erich Maria Remarque

And men will not understand us—for the generation that
grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us
already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old
occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the genera-
tion that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push
us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow
older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely sub-
mit, and most will be bewildered;—the years will pass by and
in the end we shall fall into ruin.

But perhaps all this that I think is mere melancholy and
dismay, which will fly away as the dust, when I stand once
again 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 unknown, the perplexing, the oncom-
ing things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from
dreams and from books, the whispers and divinations 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 sky line, and the canteens hum like beehives with
rumours of peace.

I stand up.

I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they can
take nothing from me, they can take 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.
All Quiet on the Western Front 215

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 sleep-
ing. 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.
 

 
ALL QUIET.ON THE

WESTERN
FRONT

 

 

Erich Maria Remarque

 
 

 
The Enduring Impact of
All Quiet on the Western Front

An essay by G. J. Meyer

All Quiet on the Western Front is, by more than one measure,
among the most important novels of the past century.

Its subject of course is epic: the so-called Great War, the
seminal calamity of modern times, the incomprehensibly vast
tragedy out of which subsequent, sometimes even bigger, hor-
rors have continued to flow in wave after numbing wave, gen-
eration after generation.

And among the numberless works inspired by that subject,
All Quiet has always stood virtually alone in terms of impact.
Other writers approached the Great War either obliquely,
using it as Ford Madox Ford did in Parade’s End as a black
background against which to explore what seemed almost the
suicide of Europe, or in bitterly poetic terms, as with Wilfred
Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Erich Maria Remarque by con-
trast confronted it so directly, with such radical simplicity,
that the result can seem almost artless by comparison. In the
course of just a few months in 1927, drawing on his brief
experience of combat as a teenage German conscript and
the year-plus he spent in a military hospital recovering from
320 A Reader's Guide

shrapnel wounds, he set down in plain terms the story of a
fictional everyman, young Private Paul Baumer. It became an
account, presented in raw and visceral terms, of how the war
destroyed Baumer spiritually, stripping him of all hope of a
future before finally, perhaps mercifully, taking his life.

The story first appeared in serial form in a newspaper, and for
almost two years thereafter no one wanted to publish it as a
book; possibly it seemed not just too journalistic, but to deal
journalistically with matters about which German readers, at
least, already had more information than they wanted. But
when Im Westen Nichts Neues appeared at last between hard cov-
ers, it sparked an explosion that no one could have foreseen.
Within eighteen months millions of copies were in print, and
carloads more were rolling off the presses in twenty-five lan-
guages. Before another three years passed, the book was being
burned by the Nazis, who found the depiction of a disillusioned
and demoralized German soldiery to be intolerably offensive.
Remarque himself being out of reach in Switzerland, the Ge-
stapo had to content itself with beheading his sister.

Eighty-five years after its first publication A// Quiet retains
a formidable global presence, conspicuously in print and now
in eBook format and in demand. It remains ze work most
closely identified with its subject—the first to come to mind,
almost inevitably, whenever First World War fiction is men-
tioned. Its durability is explained above all by the fact that,
from the day of its appearance, Remarque’s book has stood as
an immovable boulder in the path of anyone wanting to por-
tray what was arguably history’s filthiest and most utterly
pointless war as anything other than filthy and pointless.
People do continue to portray even the Great War in heroic
and romantic terms, of course; they always will, the hunger
for childish tales of glory being as inextinguishable as it is
A Reader's Guide 221

rich in potential for profit. But they can only do so by ignor-
ing the truth about a conflict in which for four years the
young men of Europe huddled in holes in the ground and
perished in storms of artillery and machine-gun fire in which
blind chance, not courage or ingenuity or any other admi-
rable quality, decided who would live and who would die.
Death literally rained down (on average, fifty-five German
soldiers died in every hour of the fifty-month-long conflict),
killing and sparing the weak and the strong at random. And
all, as would finally become undeniable, for nothing or less
than nothing. That is the bedrock on which Remarque con-
structed his tale—the story, as he said, “of a generation of
men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were
destroyed by the war.”

Timing was crucial to the book’s fate. If it had appeared soon
after the end of the war, it would have been likely to find few
readers outside Germany. By 1918, the year the war ended,
years of relentless propaganda (in the United States, even prom-
inent public figures were thrown into prison for daring to speak
against their nation’s involvement) had made certain funda-
mentals appear to be unarguably true. That the war had hap-
pened because Germany set out to subjugate Europe and the
world. That the armies of Germany, and by extension the Ger-
man people, had conducted themselves in ways so loathsome as
to disqualify them from the community of civilized human be-
ings even after the destruction of their evil regime. That the
Allied victory had been necessary to preserve not just democ-
racy but civilization itself, and that the future of civilization
would depend on keeping Germany crippled.

By the late twenties, however, such notions were growing
threadbare, their consequences painfully clear. It was becom-
ing obvious that the world the war had created—a world in
222 A Reader's Guide

which Stalin rather than the Tsar ruled Russia, and Mussolini
was making the trains of Italy run on time, and forces far
darker than anything ever dreamed by any kaiser were emerg-
ing from the wreckage of Germany—was not exactly some-
thing to be celebrated. And that a novel in which ordinary
German soldiers bore a startling resemblance to authentic
human beings—to ordinary American soldiers, even—might
not necessarily be a crime against truth.

There is nothing mysterious about the fact that Remarque’s
impact has always been particularly great in the U.S. We
Americans, in spite of our decisive role in the final victory,
have always had a defective understanding of the Great War.
For us it was a short, comparatively painless, seemingly glori-
ous episode. Our troops did not enter combat to any serious
extent until the German offensive of the spring of 1918, the
failure of that offensive left Germany terminally exhausted,
and the next six months became a process of hammering away
with our superior numbers and superior matériel until a
doomed but tenacious enemy collapsed at last. We were
encouraged—were taught—to see the war first as nothing
more complicated than a contest between good and pure evil,
then as the redemption of a decadent Europe by “our boys” as
they swooped in to end a deadlock that without their inter-
vention might have gone on until the last man was dead. This
was a naive view of an unfathomable tragedy, a war that no-
body had wanted, and its effects on Americans’ understanding
of themselves and the world and their place in the world have
been poisonous. A// Quiet arrived here as an antidote to our
national triumphalism and exceptionalism. To whatever ex-
tent it continues to serve as an antidote today, so much the

better.
{March 6, 2013}
G. J. MEYER is the author of three popular works of
history, A World Undone: The Story of the Great War,
The Tudors and The Borgias, as well as Executive Blues
and The Memphis Murders. He received an M.A.
from the University of Minnesota, where he was a
Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and later was awarded
Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship in Jour-
nalism. He has taught at colleges in Des Moines,
St. Louis, and New York, and now lives in Wilt-
shire, England.
 

 
Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Kantorek the schoolmaster convinced Paul Baumer and
all his schoolmates to enlist, but Paul's actual wartime
experiences prove to be very different than expected.
What effect do you think this had on Paul’s faith in the
adult world?

2. As their comrade Kemmerich lies dying in the infirmary,
Paul and the other soldiers gather around him to offer en-
couragement and comfort. But they re also very concerned
about who will get Kemmerich’s boots once he dies. What
is the significance of this?

3. Paul muses: We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the
world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. What makes this so
poignant?

4. What did you make of Himmelstoss’s treatment of the
soldiers, and vice versa? How did Pauls opinion of him
change over time?

5. Paul imagines that even being back in the time and place
of his happiest memories would be like gazing at the photo-
graph of a dead comrade. Those are his features, it is his face,
226

10.

ET.

12.

A Reader's Guide

and the days we spend together take on a mournful life in mem-
ory; but the man himself it is not. What did you make of his
alienation?

. When Paul is caught in a trench with a soldier from the

other side, he wants to help the man’s family after the war.
But later, back among his comrades, he says: “It was only
because 1 had to lie there with him so long . . . After all, war is
war.” What does he mean by this?

. What do you think Paul and his friends hoped to gain on

their visits to the French women across the canal? Why is
he so disappointed when he realizes that his brunette
companion is unimpressed by the fact that she'll never see

him again?

. Paul’s descriptions of the Russian prisoners of war show

evidence of compassion. How have Paul’s attitudes to-
wards the enemy changed over the course of the book?

. What did you think of the ending?

Remarque’s second novel, The Road Back, is about veterans
in postwar Germany. If Paul had not died, how do you
imagine he would have dealt with the postwar world?

A hundred years after WWI, what has changed? What has
stayed the same?

What do you think Remarque was ultimately trying to

say about war?
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE was born in Germany in
1898, and was drafted into the German army dur-
ing World War I. Throughout the hazardous years
following the war he worked at many occupations—
schoolteacher, small-town drama critic, racing
driver, and editor of a sports magazine. His first
novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, vividly describ-
ing the experiences of German soldiers during
World War I, was published in Germany in 1928.
It was a brilliant success, selling over a million cop-
ies, and it was the first of many literary triumphs by
Erich Remarque.

When the Nazis came to power, Remarque left
Germany for Switzerland. He rejected all attempts
to persuade him to return, and as a result he lost his
German citizenship, his books were burned, and
his films were banned. He went to the United States
in 1938 and became a citizen in 1947. He later
lived in Switzerland with his second wife, the ac-
tress Paulette Goddard. He died in Switzerland in
September 1970.
 

 
 

Books by
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ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
THE ROAD BACK
THREE COMRADES
FLOTSAM
ARCH OF TRIUMPH
SPARK OF LIFE
ATIMETO LOVE AND ATIME TO DIE
THE BLACK OBELISK
HEAVEN HAS NO FAVORITES
THE NIGHT IN LISBON
SHADOWS IN PARADISE

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Considered by many the greatest war novel
of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front is
Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece of
the German experience during World War I.

po

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. . .

This is the testament of Paul Biumer, who enlists with his
classmates in the German army during World War I. They become
soldiers with youthful enthusiasm. But the world of duty, culture,
and progress they had been taught breaks in pieces under the first
bombardment in the trenches.

Through years of vivid horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow:
to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young
men of the same generation but different uniforms against one
another . . . if only he can come out of the war alive.

“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque.
He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank,
a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he
writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is
sensitive, firm, and sure.”

— The New York Times Book Review

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Cover design: Tom Kluepfel
Cover image: Wilson History & Research Center,
Robby Wilson, founder