Paul Bäumer Quotes

“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”

“The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts.”

“While they 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.”

“We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see.”

“For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress—to the future.”

“It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

“We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.”

“We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”

“We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.”

“We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.”

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.”

“We are no longer untroubled—we are indifferent.”

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”

“Our knowledge of life is limited to death.”

“We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death.”

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

“A hospital alone shows what war is.”

“It’s all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops . . . we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.”

“A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.”

“They are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago.”

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. 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.”

“My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling.”

“I soon found out this much:—terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;—but it kills, if a man thinks about it.”