All quiet on the Western Front
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 oncoming 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 bring me
nothing more, they can bring me nothing more. I am so alone, and so
without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that
has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes.
Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it
will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the
whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single
sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping.
Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his
face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had
come.
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.