Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.
Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.
I carry my liberty with me. It is in my thoughts, in my head. Shakespeare is one of my countries, Goethe another. You can change that badge that I wear, but you can’t change the way I think. It is through my intellect that I can escape the roles, i...
Alas, God's poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use you...
Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality.
In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos.
I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis.
They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thi...
