Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.

Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.

But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.

We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.