All Quiet on the Western Front

So I speak to him and say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you." If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response.

abstraction = a concept not associated with any specific instance

(editor's note:  The suffix "-tion", converts a verb into a noun that denotes the action or result of the verb. Typically, there is a slight change in the ending of the root verb, as in action, education, and observation.)

Their stillness is the reason why these memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow—a vast, inapprehensible melancholy.

inapprehensible = not capable of being understood

(Editor's note:  The prefix "in-" in inapprehensible means not and reverses the meaning of apprehensible. This is the same pattern you see in words like invisible, incomplete, and insecure.)

The nights become quiet and the hunt for copper driving-bands and the silken parachutes of the French star-shells begins. Why the driving-bands are so desirable no one knows exactly. The collectors merely assert that they are valuable.†

assert = say (that something is true)

The devil take all conventions, they were made for other times;

conventions = behaviors regarded as normal

Albert cleans his nails with a knife. We are surprised at this delicacy.

delicacy = care (befitting a gentleman more than a soldier of the trenches)

He informed himself of the dispute, and only remarked: "Yes, we did have heavy losses yesterday."†

dispute = disagreement

They used to have intrigues among themselves, as always happens, and it would often come to blows and knives.†

intrigues = secret schemes or plots

...in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness.†

positive = good or beneficial

But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once.

reflect = think

In the evening it grows sultry and the heat rises from the earth.

sultry = hot and humid

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother;

sustaining = supporting