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This book is intended neither as an accusation nor as a confession, but simply as an attempt to give an account of[1] a generation that was destroyed by the war – even those of it who survived the shelling.

Copyright © The Estate of the late Paulette Remarque 1929

English translation copyright © Jonathan Cape 1994

Afterword  copyright © Brian Murdoch

© КАРО, 2019

We are in camp five miles behind the line. Yesterday our relief arrived; now our bellies are full of bully beef[2] and beans, we’ve had enough to eat and we’re well satisfied. We were even able to fill up a mess-tin for later, every one of us, and there are double rations of sausage and bread as well – that will keep us going. We haven’t had a stroke of luck[3] like this for ages; the cook-sergeant, the one with the ginger hair, is actually offering to dish out food, beckoning with his serving ladle to anyone who comes near him and giving him a massive helping. He’s getting a bit worried because he can’t see how he’s going to empty his cooking pot. Tjaden and Muller have dug out a couple of washing bowls from somewhere and got him to fill them up to the brim[4] as a reserve supply. Tjaden does things like that out of sheer greed[5]; with Muller it’s a precaution. Nobody knows where Tjaden puts it all. He’s as thin as a rake and he always has been.

The most important thing, though, is that there are double rations of tobacco as well. Ten cigars, twenty cigarettes and two plugs of chewing tobacco for everyone, and that’s a decent amount. I’ve swapped my chewing tobacco with Katczinsky for his cigarettes, and that gives me forty. You can last a day on that.

And on top of it all, we’re not really entitled to this lot. The army is never that good to us. We’ve only got it because of a mistake.

Fourteen days ago we were sent up the line as relief troops[6]. It was pretty quiet in our sector, and because of that the quartermaster drew the normal quantity of food for the day we were due back, and he catered for the full company of a hundred and fifty men. But then, on the very last day, we were taken by surprise by long-range shelling from the heavy artillery[7]. The English guns kept on pounding our position, so we lost a lot of men, and only eighty of us came back.