“On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit.
Two fellows die of tetanus. Their skin turns pale. Their limbs stiffen. At last only their eyes live, stubbornly.
Many of the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a gallows. Underneath the wound a basin is placed into which drips the pus. Every two or three hours the vessel is emptied.
Other man lie in stretching bandages with heavy weights hanging from the end of the bed. I see intestine wounds that are constantly full of excreta. The surgeon’s clerk shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed hip bones, knees and shoulders. A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily rounds.
And this is only one hospital, one single station. There are hundreds of thousands in Germany; hundreds of thousands in France; hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done or thought when such things are possible.
It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers and their hundreds of thousands.
A hospital alone shows what war is.
I am young. I am twenty years old. Yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently, slay one another
I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons, and words, to make it yet more refined and enduring
And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things. All my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered out account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing. It was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards and what shall come out of us?”