All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is a heartbreaking and bleak novel that conveys the horrors of WWI, and indeed, war in general, to the modern reader. There are many beautifully written passages, some of which I will reproduce here now.

QUOTES FROM CHAPTER FIVE

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close to one another, and the hour is like the room: 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? Formerly 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.

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.”

Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

NOTE: If anyone wants to get a sense of what it must be like to return to normal life from war should read this book. Again:

We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

Currently, I’m reading All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. It’s a really great novel. It’s heartbreaking and bleak, and it conveys the horrors of WWI, and indeed, war in general, to the modern reader. There are many beautifully written passages, some of which I will reproduce here in my blog.

At any rate, at one point during the story, two German recruits beat up their boot camp sergeant, who was an unfair mean bastard, before heading off to the front. One of the recruits exclaims savagely after the beating, “Revenge is black pudding.”

The other recruit doesn’t know what that means. Black pudding is another name for blood sausage, which is made by cooking blood and filler long enough so that it congeals when cooled. What he meant by that was that revenge tastes good. There was no turning the other cheek in this character’s heart, that’s for sure.

I like the phrase.

And now for some quotes:

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 understanding. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.

One more:

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