TALKING TO A DEAD SOLDIER
Paul Baumer was talking to a man who jumped into the fox-hole with him and whom he killed instinctively. “The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and to say to him; ‘Comrade, I did not want to kill you, If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called for its appropriate reponse. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your life and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that…
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