Commonplace Book

'...It was good to be alive; it was fine to rush around, and hand lights or liqueurs to these brown clear-cut faces, with their bright eyes, and hair of every colour; it would be no less fine to hurl them out of the way with a kick or a rifle-butt, and send them to crack their bones and smash their skulls against the wall like eggs; and then to run home free as a naked savage. They were keeping him shut up - him, Grischa - they had nailed him fast, and that vast murder, that maddening hail of shells, ten thousand in an hour, had begun again, from Dvinsk down to the country through which he had marched in the early days when the Austrians had driven them back. There was no place in the world fit to live in; but he would notice all these things and later take a red-hot awl and one of his smooth coffin-planks, and burn into it all that he had seen. But he must wait till then: now, at any rate, all was bright and happy....Grischa enjoyed the sight of them, his heart went out to them all, young, and old, and close-cropped gentlemen with monocles, that made them look like caricatures. He felt that something must be going out from him to them, there was so much love and so much hatred seething in his breast.'

from The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (Book Four, Chapter II)