Für die Bäume ist es Frühjahr, sonst nichts. Alles andere geht sie nichts an.

Was wissen sie davon? Sie waren jung, und man hat Sie mit Lügen vergiftet, bevor Sie urteilen konnten. Aber wir, - wir haben es gesehen und geschehen lassen! Was war es? Trägheit des Herzens? Gleichgültigkeit? Armut? Egoismus? Verzweiflung? Aber wie konnte es eine solche Pest weren? Meinen Sie, ich denke nicht täglich darüber nach?

our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life

We don't act like that because we are in good humor; we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.

we developed a firm, practical feeling of solidarity, which grew, on the battlefield, into the best thing that the war produced - comradeship in arms.

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.

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness - we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night.

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.