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A review by mmefish
Три товарища by Erich Maria Remarque

reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

4.5

"Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to."

A novel about how feeble our lives are; about happines, love and friendship. Remarque crafted illustrious descriptions of the horrors of war and the pain-numbing power of alcohol, of loneliness and despair. 

"Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end."

Not to laugh at the twentieth century is to shoot yourself. But you can't laugh for long. It's too much a matter for tears. 

Theatres, concerts, books—all these middle-class habits I had almost lost. It was not the time for them. Politics provided theatre enough—the shootings every night made another concert—and the gigantic book of poverty was more impressive than any library.

"Pity is the most useless article in the world,” said I irritably. "It’s the reverse side of gloating, you ought to know that."

Little by little things began to assume a new aspect. The sense of insecurity vanished, words came of themselves, I was no longer so painfully conscious of everything I said. I drank on and felt the great soft wave approach and embrace me; the dark hour began to fill with pictures and stealthily the noiseless procession of dreams appeared again superimposed on the dreary, grey landscape of existence.

It was summer, 1917. Our company was in Flanders at the time and we had got unexpectedly a few days leave to Ostend—Meyer, Holthoff, Bryer, Lütgens, myself and some others. Most of us had never seen the sea before, and these few days—this almost unbelievable interlude between death and death—became one complete surrender to sun and sand and sea. We spent all day on the beach, we stretched our naked bodies in the sun—for merely to be naked, not laden with pack, rifle and uniform, was already almost peace. We raced up and down the sands and dashed again into the water; we were conscious of our limbs, our breath, our movements, with all the vigour and intensity that the things of life had at that time—for those hours we forgot everything, and we wanted to forget. But at night, in the twilight, when the sun was gone and grey shadows from the skyline ran in over the pallid waters, then gradually there mingled with the roar of the surf another tone, which grew louder and finally drowned it—a dull, menacing sound: the bombardment of the Front. Then it would happen suddenly that a livid silence would interrupt the talk, heads would lift and listen, and out of the merry faces of tired, played-out schoolboys would swiftly leap the hard visages of the soldiers, for an instant touched by a surprise, a sadness in which was implicit all that would never be uttered—courage and bitterness and greed of life, the will to duty, the despair, the hope and the enigmatic sorrow of those appointed early to die. Then, a few days later, began the great Offensive, and already by the third of July the company had only thirty-two men, and Meyer, Holthoff and Lütgens were dead.
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