of them. Kemmerich will die; it is immaterial who gets them. Why, then, should Müller not succeed to them? he has more right than a hospital-orderly. When Kemmerich is dead it will be too late. Therefore Müller is already on the watch.
We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important for us. And good boots are scarce.
★★
Once it was different. When we went to the District Commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. We had no definite plans for our future. Our thoughts of a career and occupation were as yet of too unpractical a character to furnish any scheme of life. We were still crammed full of vague ideas which gave to life, and to the war also, an ideal and almost romantic character. We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognized that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence
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