Free All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

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 generation.
    Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”
    He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
    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.
    No one knows, of course. Himmelstoss glowers at us wrathfully. “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 letting a bundle of wire fall on Himmelstoss’s leg,” hints Kropp.
    “We’ll have quite a lot of jokes with him,” laughs Müller.
    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 shoulders.
    “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 expect 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, andask 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 evening. 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. Himmelstoss 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 confess, for Kropp tells the same story.
    “Why didn’t someone report the matter, then?” asks Bertink.
    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 Himmelstoss, making it plain to him that the front isn’t a