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If Muller wants Kemmerich’s flying boots, this doesn’t make him any more unfeeling than somebody who would find such a wish too painful even to contemplate. It’s just that he can keep things separate in his mind. If the boots were any use at all to Kemmerich, Muller would sooner walk barefoot over barbed-wire than give a single thought to getting them. But as it is, the boots are objects which now have nothing to do with Kemmerich’s condition, whereas Muller can do with them. Kemmerich is going to die, whoever gets them. So why shouldn’t Muller try and get hold of them – after all, he has more right to them than some orderly. Once Kemmerich is dead it will be too late. That’s why Muller is keeping an eye on them now.

We have lost all our ability to see things in other ways, because they are artificial. For us, it is only the facts that count. And good boots are hard to come by.

We were not always like that. We went down to the local recruiting office, still a class of twenty young men, and then we marched off en masse[36], full of ourselves, to get a shave at the barber’s – some of us for the first time – before we set foot on a parade-ground[37]. We had no real plans for the future and only very few of us had thoughts of careers or jobs that were firm enough to be meaningful in practical terms. On the other hand, our heads were full of nebulous ideas which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life and even the war for us.

We had ten weeks of basic training, and that changed us more radically than ten years at school. We learnt that a polished tunic button is more important than a set of philosophy books. We came to realize – first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference – that intellect apparently wasn’t the most important thing, it was the kit-brush[38]; not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it no longer struck us as odd that an ex-postman with a couple of stripes should have more power over us than our parents ever had, or our teachers, or the whole course of civilization from Plato[39] to Goethe[40]. With our young, wide-open eyes we saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, in practical terms at that moment, surrendering our individual personalities more completely than we would ever have believed possible even in the most obsequious errand boy[41]. Saluting, eyes front, marching, presenting arms, right and left about, snapping to attention[42], insults and a thousand varieties of bloody-mindedness – we had imagined that our task would be rather different from all this, but we discovered that we were being trained to be heroes the way they train circus horses, and we quickly got used to it. We even understood that some of these things were necessary, but that others, by the same token[43], were completely superfluous. Soldiers soon sort out which is which.