Our Task

Whoever wants to live needs a watchword. It cannot be love for us, rather struggle. 

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It is the soldier’s privilege that he wants to have everything, because he must give everything. His morality has nothing in common with the well-behaved practices of a bourgeois
society. His morality is the morality of the strong, healthy and natural. It is the morality of life, of primal energy, which never has rest, which must always work. The soldier is accustomed to live to the full. He does not care for the lazy, desolate and half-life of the salon heroes and dressed up dandies. Where else should he go with his overflowing life will, which he needs in order to survive even the final thing. Every second he must be ready to risk everything, to sacrifice everything. At any hour the trumpet can resound that calls him to the battlefield. At any hour, however, he must also be able to tell himself: You have done what you as a man could do. You do not need to regret a single day that you wasted as lukewarm and half person.

Duty demands his whole life. Hence he also places full demand on life. He has a right to it. He knows no boundaries in his faith, in his pluck, in his love and in his hate. His measure is the measureless.

He is everywhere there is distress. He comes uncalled, for he seeks struggle for the sake of struggle. The soldier wants no reward. His reward is the happiness to be allowed to serve. The soldier wants no gratitude. At most, the one that he can die decently. He builds his own life alright. The soldier needs no recognition. What he has done, he already knows himself. It is not worth
talking about it. For non-soldiers especially not at all. The soldier wants no special rights. He has duties enough. But he fights for the rights of his folk. The soldier needs no church. Because he
lives in piety. The soldier cannot cry. Instead he laughs all the louder. The soldier does not die loudly. Instead all the more upright and beautiful.

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He is simply a real fellow. And we need real fellows. It is our task to be heroes.

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From day to day, from deed to deed, strides the hero. He knows God gave him this life so that he may consecrate it to his folk. He knows that he possesses a fate with which he must wrestle. Yet he loves the struggle and most passionately the struggle with his own fate. He has only one life to live on earth. Hence he lives it fully. He defies his way forward over mountains and valleys, through
dark and light. He wrestles his way higher through distress and suffering, through storm and sunshine. And if he is at an end, if he has grown in himself, he looks at his work that he created and can say: I have lived!

-Excerpted from Gott und Volk