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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war
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Erich Maria Remarque
From Three Comrades (1936)
Translated by A.W. Wheen
I sat a long while and thought of all sorts of things. Among others, of how we came back from the war, like miners from a pit disaster, young and disillusioned of everything but ourselves. We had meant to wage war against the lies, the selfishness, the greed, the inertia of the heart that was the cause of all that lay behind us; we had become hard, without trust in anything but in our comrades beside us and in things – the sky, trees, the earth, bread, tobacco, that never played false to any man, – and what had come of it? All collapsed, perverted and forgotten. And to those who had not forgotten was left only powerlessness, despair, indifference and schnapps. The day of great dreams for the future of mankind was past. The busybodies, the self-seekers triumphed. Corruption…Misery…
***
Isn’t he a charming little thing?” asked Frau Zalewski with swimming eyes.
“One will be able to tell that better in twenty or thirty years’ time,” said I…
“But take a good look at it,” Frau Hasse insisted.
I looked. It was a baby like any other. I could discover nothing remarkable about it. At most it had terrible small hands, and it was extraordinary to think one had been just so tiny oneself once.
“Poor worm,” said I. “little does he guess what is ahead of him. What sort of war has he arrived just in time for, I wonder.”
“Don’t be horrid,” replied Frau Zalewski. “Have you no feeling?”
“Much too much,” I explained, “or I wouldn’t hit on such ideas.”
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