Here,
On the borders of death,
Every day and Every hour,
It has awakened in us the sense of comradeship.
It is a great brotherhood;
Life follows an amazingly simple course,
We have the feeling of solidarity of convicts,
It is limited to what is most necessary,
The desperate loyalty to one anther,
All else lies buried in gloomy sleep
Also in the tension and forlornness of death
We must long since have gone mad, have deserted, or have fallen.
If one wants to appraise it;
It is at once heroic and banal—
But who wants to do that?
The day, the weeks, and the years
Out here shall come back again,
And our dead comrades shall then stand up again
And march with us, we shall have a purpose,
So we march,
Our dead comrades beside us, the years of the front behind us
Against whom,
Against whom?