I remember quite enjoying this read.

p3 - we weren’t interested in anything.

p4 - When we saw each other again around 6p.m., we were at war.

p6 - the idiotic irrevocability … who had decided on war… by a cold order from above

p9 - made me as anxious as if I was arriving at the front line. … I felt I was in a more familiar environment, but at the same time an outsider.

p18 - the war meant carrying paralyzed old men to the toilet. I went home, took off my uniform, put on my civvies, and went back to the refugees. There I felt immediately at ease… I could make myself genuinely useful. … I had toyed with the idea of being torn between cynicism and moralism

p21 - The war was here, the war he had declared … as thought it were some sort of a game, he sought only the complicity of other people … in order not to spoil his party … we were more adult than he was, in not wanting to play his game.

p25 - After dinner I could not wait to go out again for a walk, even though I did practically nothing else all day but walk. Perhaps that was exactly the time when I began to enjoy living … I was at the age when you are convinced that every new thing you gain is something you have always had. … the war seemed something distant and routine

p29 - ==for the conquering soldier every land is enemy territory, even his own.==

p36 - ‘They’re here! They’re here!’ ‘Who? The Spanish?’ ‘No, the people bringing lunch.’

p37 - What was missing were those insignificant details, like the colours of paint on the walls around shops or the difference bodywork of their cars that give a sense of a life … the sense of a France that was alive. This was a France that was dead.

p38 - my awkwardness in the way I wore my uniform, because it had been forced on me, and because I was predestined to belong to those human beings who have uniforms imposed on them and not to those who use them as an instrument of authority.

p39 - this atmosphere of comradely complicity made me feel slightly uneasy … the ta-ra-ra of a trumpet

p48 - the “good guys” were the looters.

p52 - Facist sailors burst in, out of breath and all peering forward like bloodhounds

p55 - Boy’s let’s not forget, this is a conquered city and we are the conquerors. Everything in it belongs to us … any young man who is here today and does not take away something is a fool! … I would be ashamed to shake his hand! … There: I would take away that key as a souvenir, a Facist key. … when they didn’t find it they would go mad, they would be unable to lock a room that contained some vast secret treasure, or documents on which their own personal fates depended. … now my jacket was full of them … I must have had twenty keys on me.

p58 - I was a saboteur of Fascism in conquered territory…