“When I think about it, Albert,” I say after a while rolling over on my back, “when I hear the word ‘peacetime,’ it goes to my head: and if it really came, I think I would do some unimaginable thing⁠—something, you know, that it’s worth having lain here in the muck for. But I can’t even imagine anything. All I do know is that this business about professions and studies and salaries and so on⁠—it makes me sick, it is and always was disgusting. I don’t see anything at all, Albert.”

All at once everything seems to me confused and hopeless.

Kropp feels it too. “It will go pretty hard with us all. But nobody at home seems to worry much about it. Two years of shells and bombs⁠—a man won’t peel that off as easy as a sock.”

We agree that it’s the same for everyone; not only for us here, but everywhere, for everyone who is of our age; to some more, and to others less. It is the common fate of our generation.