Our knowledge of life is limited to death

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

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it

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.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.