You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that.

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? That is long ago. We are old folk.

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.

The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.

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 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.

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.