To mark Remembrance Day Radio 4’s Saturday afternoon play was a dramatisation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I read it years ago and had forgotten most of it except for the last lines:-
He fell in October 1918 on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army dispatches restricted themselves to the simple sentence that there was nothing new to report on the western front. He was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over you could see that he could not have suffered long. His face was so composed that it looked as if he was almost happy that it had turned out that way.
Picture from the German cemetery at Ypres. The British and Commonwealth cemeteries are in white stone with little gardens and look bright and clean, even cheerful except that they represent so many dead. The German cemetery is sombre and shaded with oaks, and the stones are black.
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