It's Only Terrible To Have Nothing To

I Had The Feeling Of Slipping Down A Smooth Bottomless Pit. It Had Nothing To Do With Breuer And The People. It Had Nothing To Do With Pat Even. It Was The Melancholy Secret That Reality Can Arouse Desires But Never Satisfy Them; That Love Begins With A Human Being But Does Not End In Him; And That Everything Can Be There: A Human Being, Love, Happiness, Life — And That Yet In Some Terrible Way It Is Always Too Little, And Grows Ever Less The More It Seems.

Every Little Bean Must Be Heard As Well As Seen!

And Even If These Scenes From Our Youth Were Given Back To Us We Would Hardly Know What To Do. The Tender, Secret Influence That Passed From Them Into Us Could Not Rise Again. We Might Be Amongst Them And Move In Them; We Might Remember And Love Them And Be Stirred By The Sight Of Them. But It Would Be Like Gazing At The Photograph Of A Dead Comrade; Those Are His Features, It Is His Face, And The Days We Spent Together Take On A Mournful Life In The Memory; But The Man Himself It Is Not.

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.

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.