In fact these mountains could not be seen from Nui Dat unless you bothered to climb up to the artillery positions on Nui Dat Hill and peer toward the western horizon with binoculars. They reached over the horizon, floating in the air mystically on the shimmering mirage caused by the heat hitting the flat paddy-fields between here and there. About a dozen such mountain groups were visible, and for a long time there was much confusion in our minds concerning which range of mountains were the right ones. And even when you got closer, as you did during those atrocious operations defending the Sappers laying the Great Exploding Fence, they did not appear to be so ruggedly impenetrable as you had been told. There were five peaks of fairly even height, rearing straight up out of otherwise utterly flat terrain, standing aloof and alone, but those ridgelines, even without the initial inclination of foothills, seemed to be of fairly gentle gradients when compared to some of the craggy monsters you had scaled in training in North Queensland. There were no sheer cliffs, and no plunging abyss into which Australian Army Issue Gullivers could be cast by midgets.

… The earth bursts before us. It rains clods. I feel a smack. My sleeve is torn away. I shut my fist. No pain. Still that does not reassure me: wounds don’t hurt till afterwards. I feel the arm all over. It is grazed but sound. Now a crack on the skull, I begin to lose consciousness. Like lightning the thought comes to me: Don’t faint. I sink down in the black broth and immediately come up to the top again. A splinter slashes into my helmet, but has already travelled so far it does not go through. I wipe the mud out of my eyes. A hole is torn up in front of me. Shells hardly ever land in the same hole twice, I’ll get into it. With one lunge, I shoot as flat as a fish over the ground; there it whistles again, quickly I crouch together, claw for cover, feel something on my left, shove in beside it, it gives way, I groan, the earth leaps, the blast thunders in my ears, I creep under the yielding thing, cover myself with it, draw it over me, it is wood, cloth, cover, cover, cover, miserable cover against the whizzing splinters.
    I open my eyes—my fingers grasp a sleeve, an arm. A wounded man? I yell to him—no answer—a dead man. My hand gropes further, splinters of wood—now I remember again that we are lying in a graveyard.
    But the shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities, I merely crawl still further under the coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it.
    Before me gapes the shell-hole. I grasp it with my eyes as with fists. With one leap I must be in it. There, I get a smack in the face, a hand clasps on to my shoulder—has the dead man waked up?—The hand shakes me, I turn my head, in the second of light I stare into the face of Katczinsky, he has his mouth wide open and is yelling. I hear nothing, he rattles me, comes nearer, in a momentary lull his voice reaches me: “Gas—Gaas—Gaaas—Pass it on.”
    I grab for my gas-mask. Some distance from me there lies someone. I think nothing but this: That fellow must know: Gaaas—Gaaas—…
…    The dull thud of gas-shells mingles with the crashes of high explosives. A bell sounds between explosions, gongs and metal clappers warning everyone—Gas—Gas—Gaas—
    Someone plumps down behind me, another.  I wipe the goggles of my mask clear of the moist breath. It is Kat, Kropp, and someone else. All four of us lie there in heavy, watchful suspense and breathe as lightly as possible.
    These first minutes with the mask decide between life and death: is it air-tight? I remember the awful sights in the hospital the gas patients who lay in day-long suffocation cough up their burnt lungs in clots.
    Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jelly-fish it floats in our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely. I nudge Kat, it is better to crawl out and lie on top than stay were the mask collects most. But we don’t get as far as that; a second bombardment begins. It is no longer as though shells roared; it is the earth itself raging…
…    He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to a single sentence: All Quiet on the Western Front.
    He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad that the end had come.