It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

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.

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.

I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.