All Quiet on the Western Front Quotes

There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that there was only one way of doing well, and that way theirs. And that is just why they let us down so badly. (1.47)

Paul

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 into pieces. (1.63)

Paul

But on the last day an astonishing number of English field guns opened up on us with high-explosive, drumming ceaselessly on our position, so that we suffered heavily and came back only eighty strong. (1.4)

Paul

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 next to none, and fourteen days is a long time at one stretch. (1.5)

Paul

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavor to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. (1.42)

Paul

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. (1.60)

Paul (about Joseph Behm)

While they (the pontificating teachers and politicos) 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. (1.49)

Paul (about his teachers and his generation)

We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from the true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. (1.64)

Paul

The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas people who were better off were beside themselves with joy, though they should have been much better able to judge what the consequences would be. (1.58)

Paul

Under the skin the life no longer pulses, it has already pressed out to 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. (1.72)

Paul

Now the trees are green again. Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible. (11.1)

Paul

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. (1.1)

Paul

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 [...] we hear the muffled rumble of the front only as a very distant thunder, bumble-bees 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 newspapers and smoke. (1.46)

Paul

Iron Youth. Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk. (1.106)

Paul

On the right side of the meadow a large cannon latrine has been built, a well-planned and durable construction. But that is for the recruits who as yet have not learned how to make the most of whatever comes their way. We look for something better. Scattered 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 [...] we move three together in a ring and sit down comfortably. For two hours we have been here without getting up. (1.38)

Paul

We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals. (2.27)

Paul

When we went to the District Commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts for a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish any scheme of life. We were still crammed with vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also, an ideal and almost romantic character. (2.4)

Paul

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 servant. (2.5)

Paul

I collect the things, untie Kemmerich's identification disc and take it away. The orderly asks about the pay-book. I say that it is probably in the Orderly room, and go. Behind me they are already hauling Franz onto the waterproof sheet. (2.57)

Paul

He turns away. After a pause he says slowly: "I wanted to become a head-forester once." (2.31)

Franz Kemmerich > Paul Bäumer

"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 sticklebacks! You can build an aquarium again and keep fish in it, and you can go out without asking anyone, you can even play the piano if you want to." (2.41)

Paul Bäumer >Franz Kemmerich

My thoughts become confused. This atmosphere of carbolic and gangrene clogs the lungs, it is a thick gruel, it suffocates. (2.37)

Paul

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. (2.40)

Paul

We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. (2.5)

Paul

[Kemmerich] raises himself on the pillow with his elbows. "They have amputated my leg." (2.19)

Kemmerich>Paul

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 at home as long as possible, and that he could do only by being strict with the recruits. (2.15)

Paul

t is strange to think that at home in the drawer of my 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 [...] 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. (2.1)

Paul

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. (2.53)

Paul

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. (2.58)

Paul

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." (3.82)

Paul

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. (3.42)

Paul about Kropp's idea for war

"Let a man be whatever you like in peace-time, 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." (3.55)

Kat

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. (3.62)

Paul

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 reveled 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. (3.62)

Paul

Returning 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 [Himmelstoss] would be alone. At last we heard his footstep, which we recognized easily, so often had we heard it in the mornings as the door flew open and he bawled: "Get up!" (3.66)

Himmelstoss>Paul

He put himself in position with evident satisfaction, raised his arm like a signal-mast and his hand like a coal-shovel and fetched such a blow on the white sack as would have felled an ox. (3.71)

Paul about Himmelstoss

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

"Revenge is black-pudding." (3.78-79)

Haie>Paul

I nod. We stick out our chests, shave in the open, shove our hands in our pockets, inspect the recruits and feel ourselves to be stone-age veterans. (3.2)

Paul

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 resemblance to home; your rooms, full of the smell of stale food, sleep, smoke, and clothes! (3.46)

Paul

The question revives Kropp, more particularly as he hears there's no more beer in the canteen. "It's not only Himmelstoss, there are lots of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they'd swallowed concrete." (3.54)

Kropp

"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 elsewhere. For instance, 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." (3.55)

Paul and Kat

Perhaps it is our inner and most secret life that shivers and falls on guard. (4.21)

Paul

But the shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities, I merely crawl still deeper in the coffin, it should protect me, and especially as Death himself lies in it too. (4.88)

Paul

I don't know whether it's morning or evening. I lie in the pale cradle of the twilight, and listen for the soft words which will come, soft and near - am I crying? I put my hand to my eyes, it is so fantastic; am I a child? (4.43)

Paul

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

Kat

Beside 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. (4.48)

Paul

"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." (5.26)

Haie to Paul

"In the army in peace time you've nothing to trouble about," he goes on, "your food's found everyday, 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." (5.38)

Haie to Paul

Detering is paring 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." (5.50).

Detering to Paul

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war. (5.121)

Paul

"The war has ruined us for everything"

Albert Kropp

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. (5.37)

Paul about Haie

"Again there is the lofty sky with the stars 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".

Paul

"the high-water mark of his life" (5.5).

Tjaden about whipping Himmelstoss

- "How can a man take all that stuff seriously when he's once been out here?" (5.108)

Kropp

"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 suspense of uncertainty. Over us Chance hovers" (6.10).

Paul

"We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost" (6.105).

Paul

The days are hot and the dead lie unburied" (6.117).

Paul

They "choke to death with hemorrhages and suffocation" (6.139).

about the new recruits

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; [...] we see men without mouths, jaws, 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" (6.158).

Paul

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as the sorrow - a strange, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires - but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. (6.100)

Paul

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. (6.79)

Paul

You lump, will you get out - you hound, you skunk, "You sneak out of it, would you?" His eye becomes glassy, I knock his head against the wall - "You cow" - I kick him in the ribs - "You swine" - I push him toward the door and shove him out head first. (6.148)

Paul to Himmelstoss

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost. (6.105)

Paul about Lost Generation

The parachute-lights shoot 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 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 darkness that only churches have, and I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love (6.93)

Paul

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. (6.50)

Paul

He listens and for a moment his eye becomes clear. Then again he has the glowering eyes of a mad dog, he is silent, he shoves me aside. (6.54)

Paul about a recruit

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 with hands and helmets is hunting us down - now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now, for the first time in three 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 be revenged. (6.73)

Paul

If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb into him. (6.74)

Paul

We can hardly control ourselves when our hunted 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 kill. (6.81)

Paul

We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again. (6.85)

Paul about food