I'm starting to imagine these stories about soldiers dying as a mourning ritual; reunion, reunitings, and liaisons are all so intimately connected to death in these stories and so richly tinged with the perfect world before the war—of the beautiful people in it and of the contrast between the blooming beauty of civilian life and a life spent in foxholes under the regime of swishing bullets.

I still think Böll is so much less interesting when he actually writes out the war, although even then the most pedestrian stories from him are still very good—there's a tenderness to his male protagonists that I find to be very nice (perhaps in part because they're all very young, but also perhaps because they all clearly don't want to be there—a figment of the author's Catholic imagination).

I really liked the dreamy, accidentally prescient first paragraph about looking at falling spheres of light as harbingers of death and destruction. The rest of the story I find to be a bit archetypical—a soldier with a civlilian mindset going through the motions of trudging through blood, mud, and debris in the trenches. It's very much saturated grounds at this point (think how much of the visual culture around both world wars are centered around this basic premise of a seemingly pointless quest—the inherent insignificance of the act of getting rations, delivering an order, or saving a brother are all there to highlight the fact that all the fighting is essentially meaningless); though I suppose perhaps it has not yet been run down to death back then.

I enjoyed this, but I do find Böll writing about war obliquely to be far more interesting.

A twin to the more famous "Stranger, Bear Words to the Spartans We...", here too is a young man on a stretcher whose lapsing consciousness slowly came to recognise rubbled elements from his childhood—only instead of a school it's the corpse of a friend, and instead of the start of an ambiguously-ending operation, it is the metaphorical extinguishing of life's flames.

I wonder why Böll loves the colour green so much, which I also remember to be a major descriptor of the environment in previous stories (in particular "Drinking in Petöcki"). I have theories (mostly ones centered around this idea that Nazi German iconography has largely consisted of colours that feel industrial, i.e. the black and white and red of their flag, but also the metallic surfaces of their war machines, which all feel very antithetical to green), but other than its sickly effect (these aren't really nice shades of green that he's describing), the deeper meening eludes me still.