Picked it up because my next project is catalyzed by an event in the Great War and already know that AQotWF will be the definitive guide to that experience. It gives shape to my wartime hero.
"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....We became soldiers with an eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe."
"It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men."
"No doubt his wife still thinks of him; she does not know what happened. He looks as if he would have often written to her; --she will still be getting mail from him--To-morrow, in a week's time--perhaps even a stray letter a month hence. She will read it, and in it he will be speaking to her." I think about this all the time. I can't not include this. A voice from beyond the grave. Re-animated but entirely different, other-worldly because no longer of this world.
