The Leader of Our Group, Shrewd, Cunning, and Hard-Bitten, Forty Years of Age, with A

“The leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs" – description of Katczinsky p2/3

“Katczinsky is right when he says it would not be such a bad war if only one could get a little more sleep. In the line we have next to none, and fourteen days is a long time at one stretch.” Chpt 1 p2

“Because he could not see, and was mad with pain, he failed to keep under cover, and so was shot down before anyone could go and fetch him” – Chpt 1 p8 Killing of Joseph Behm (class clown and rabble rouser who nearly didn’t join up) who was first to fall

“While they (the pontificating teachers and politicos) continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying. While they taught that duty to one's country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger” – Chpt 1 p9

“There in the bed is our pal Kemmerich, who was frying horse-meat with us not long ago, and squatting with us in a shell-hole – it’s still him, but it isn’t really him any more; his image has faded, become blurred, like a photographic plate that’s had too many copies made from it. Even his voice sounds like ashes.” Chapt 1 p10

“Muller starts on again about the flying boots. ‘They would fit me perfectly. In these clodhoppers even my blisters get blisters. Do you think he’ll last until we come off duty tomorrow? If he goes during the night we’ve seen the last of the boots’” Chapt 1 p12

"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." Chpt 1 p13

“We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.” Chapt 2 p16

“We became tough, suspicious, hardhearted, vengeful and rough – and a good thing too, because they were just the qualities we needed.” Chapt 2 p19 – Paul’s reflection on his training.

“He turns away. After a pause he says slowly: ‘I wanted to become a head-forester once.’” – hopes and dreams of Kemmerich Chpt 2 p20

“Now he is lying there – and for what reason? Everybody in the whole world ought to be made to walk past his bed and be told: ‘This is Franz Kemmerich, he’s nineteen and a half, and he doesn’t want to die! Don’t let him die!’” Chapt 2 p21

“My thoughts run wild. This atmosphere of carbolic and gangrene clogs the lungs, like thick, suffocating porridge.” Chpt 2 p21 - Paul’s visit to a hospital

“I take the things and undo Kemmerich's identity tag. The orderly asks for his pay book. It isn’t there. I say it is probably in the guard room, and leave. Behind me they are already bundling Franz on to a tarpaulin.” – Chpt 2 p 23

“We could not do without Katczinsky; he has a sixth sense. There are men like him everywhere, but you can’t tell who they are just by looking.” Chapt 3 P26

“He can find anything – cam stoves, and firewood when it is cold, hay and straw tables, chairs – but above all he can find food.” Chapt 3 p28 Paul speaking about Kat.

“Whatever a man is in civilian life, what sort of job could he possibly find where he could get away with that sort of behaviour without getting a punch on the nose for it? The only place he can do it is in the army.” Kat’s reflection on the behaviour of Himmelstoss Chapt 3 p31

“We set out as soldiers, and we might be grumbling or we might be cheerful – we reach the zone where the front line begins, and we have turned into human animals.” Chapt 4 p39

“Close by us there is a recruit, a blond lad, and he is terrified. He has pressed his face into his hands. His helmet has rolled off. I reach for it and try to put it on to his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet away and huddles in under my arm like a child, his head against my chest.” Chpt 4 p42

“I have never heard a horse scream and I can hardly believe it. There is a whole world of pain in that sound, creation itself under torture, a wild and horrifying agony.” Chapt 4 p 43 (Paul’s description of wounded horses)

“We sit down and press our hands over our ears. But the terrible crying and groaning and howling still gets through, it penetrates everything.” Chapt 4 p44 (Paul’s description of wounded horses)

“We can all stand a lot, but this brings us out in a cold sweat. You want to get up and run away, anywhere just so as not to hear that screaming any more. And it isn’t men, just horses.” Chapt 4 p44

“I know the terrible sights from the field hospital, soldiers who have been gassed, choking for days on end as they spew up their burned-out lungs, bit by bit.” Chapt 4 p47

“At the moment he is still in shock and can’t feel anything. Within an hour he’ll be a screaming mass of unbearable agonies, and the few days he still has left to live will just be an incessant raging torture.” Chapt 4 p50 (Paul’s description of wounded soldier)

“The falling rain is monotonous. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead men up at the front of the truck, on the body of the little recruit with a wound that is far too big for his hip, it’s falling on Kemmerich’s grave, and it’s falling in our hearts.” Chapt 4 P51

“Two years of rifle fire and hand grenades – you can’t just take it all off like a pair of socks afterwards – “Chapt 5 P61

"The war has ruined us for everything." Chpt 5 p61

"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." Chpt 5 p61

“We don’t talk much, but we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other that I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us death.” Chapt 5 p66 (Paul reflecting on his relationship with Kat)

“Every soldier owes the fact that he is still alive to a thousand lucky chances and nothing else. And every soldier believes in and trusts to chance.” Chapt 6 p70

“The rats here are especially repulsive, because they are so huge. They are the sort they call corpse-rats.” Chapt 6 p71

“In one of the adjacent sectors the rats attacked two big cats and a dog, bit them to death and ate them.” Chapt 6 p71

“We tighten our belts and chew each mouthful three times as long as usual. But it still isn’t enough; we are bloody hungry.” Chapt 6 p75

“One of the recruits cracks. I have been watching him for a long time, seeing the way he has been constantly grinding his teeth and clenching and unclenching his fists. We are all too familiar with those hunted, wild eyes.” Chapt 6 p 75

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as the sorrow – a strange, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires – but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us – Chpt 6 – the soldiers are losing their dreams – there is extreme sadness expressed here.

“We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men, we are coarse, unhappy and superficial – I think that we are lost.” Chapt 6 p85

“Their dead, downy, thin-featured faces have that awful absence of any expression that you see in dead children.” Chapt 6 p90 Paul looking at young dead recruits.

“They are wearing battledress, trousers and army boots, but for most of them the uniform is too big and flaps about, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; there weren’t any uniforms available in these children’s sizes.” Chapt 6 p91 – speaking about the sorrow he feels over the young recruits

“Continuous fire, defensive fire, curtain fire, trench mortars, gas tanks, machine guns, hand-grenades – words, words, words, but they embrace all the horrors of the world.” Chapt 6 p92

“Himmelstoss comes over to talk to us. He has changed his high and mighty attitude since being in the trenches. He suggests a truce with us, and I am willing.” Chapt 7 p 96

“We turn into animals when we go up the line, because it is the only way we can survive.” Chapt 7 p97

“The horror of the front fades away when you turn your back on it, so we can attack it with coarse or black humour.” Chapt 7 p 97

“It isn’t because we are naturally cheerful that we make jokes, it’s just that we keep cheerful because if we didn’t we’d be done for.” Chapt 7 p98

“One thing I do know: everything that is sinking into us like a stone now, while we are in the war, will rise up again when the war is over, and that’s when the real life-and-death struggle will start.” Chapt 7 p98

“Mother, what kind of an answer can I give you? You won’t understand and never will. And I don’t want you to. Was it bad, you ask – you, Mother. I shake my head and say, ‘No, Mother, not really.” Chapt 7 p111/112

I imagined leave would be different. A year ago it actually was different. I suppose I’m the one who has changed in the meantime. A great gulf has opened up between then and now. I didn’t know what the war was really like – we had only been in quiet sectors. Now I can see that I have become more brittle without realising it.” Chpt 7 p116 Paul on returning home on leave

“I feel agitated; but I don’t want to be, because it isn’t right. I want to get that quiet rapture back, feel again, just as before, that fierce and unnamed passion I used to feel when I looked at my books.” Chapt 7 p118

“Suddenly a terrible feeling of isolation wells up inside me. I can’t get back, I’m locked out; however much I might plead, however much I try, nothing moves, and I sit there as wretched as a condemned man and the past turns away from me.” Chapt 7 p119

“What is leave? Just a deviation that makes everything afterwards that much harder to take.” Chapt 7 p124

“I bury my head in my pillow. I clench my fists round the iron uprights on my bedstead. I should never have come home. Out there I was indifferent, and a lot of the time I was completely without hope – I can never be like that again.” Chapt 7 p128

“It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have faces that make one think – honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair. They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple-picking. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland” – Chpt 8 p131 Paul commenting on Russian prisoners of war

“Why on earth should a French locksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it’s just the governments. I’d never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and most of the Frenchmen won’t have seen one of us.” Chapt 9 p141

“Dead men are hanging in the trees. In one of them a naked soldier is squatting in the branches; his helmet is still on his head, but otherwise he has nothing on. There is only the top half of him up there, a head and body with legs missing.” Chapt 9 p142

“I’m no longer a shivering scrap of humanity alone in the dark – I belong to them and they to me, we all share the same fear and the same life.” Chapt 9 P145 Paul speaking about his friends and fellow soldiers.

“The dying man is the master of these hours, he has an invisible dagger to stab me with: the dagger of time and my own thoughts.” Chapt 9 p 151 – Paul referring to French soldier

“I just thought about your hand grenades, your bayonet and your weapons – now I can see your wife, and your face, and what we have in common. Forgive me, camarade!” Chapt 9 p152 Paul speaking to dying French soldier

“Why don’t they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours” Chapt 9 p153 Paul speaking to French soldier

“Forgive me, camarade, how could you be my enemy? If we threw these uniforms and weapons away you could be just as much my brother as Kat and Albert.” Chapt 9 p153

“It is impossible to grasp the fact that there are human faces above these torn bodies, faces in which life goes on from day to day. And on top of it all, this is just one single military hospital, just one – there are hundreds of thousands of them in Germany, hundreds of thousands of them in France, hundreds of thousands of them in Russia.” Chapt 10 p180 highlights the irony as hospital is a place where you go to get better – there is no hope offered in these hospitals. Focus on all soldiers - universally

“Only a military hospital can show you what war is.” Chapt 10 p180

“I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering.” Chapt 10 p180

“For years our occupation has been killing – that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?” Chapt 10 p 180

“No man’s land is outside us and inside us too.” Chapt 11 p185

“Before he died he gave me his paybook and passed on his boots – the ones he inherited from Kemmerich that time. I wear them, because they are a good fit. Tjaden will get them after me – I’ve promised him.” Chapt 11 p190 Boots symbolise death and friendship

“Trench, hospital, mass grave – there are no other possibilities.” Chapt 11 p192

“The fear of loneliness wells up in me. If Kat is taken out I’ll have no friends here at all.” Chapt 11 p196

“I am sad, it is impossible that Kat, my friend Kat, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the thin, soft moustache, Kat, whom I know in a different way from every other person, Kat the man I shared these years with – it is impossible that I might never see Kat again.” Chapt 11 p196