No Man's Land (84 page)

But perhaps all these thoughts of mine are just melancholy and confusion, which will be blown away like dust when I am standing underneath the poplars once again, and listening to the rustle of their leaves. It cannot have vanished entirely, that tenderness that troubles our blood, the uncertainty, the worry, all the things to come, the thousand faces of the future, the music of dreams and books, the rustling and the idea of women. All this cannot have collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels.

The trees here glow bright and gold, the rowan berries are red against the leaves, white country roads run on towards the horizon, and the canteens are all buzzing like beehives with rumours of peace.

I stand up.

I am very calm. Let the months come, and the years, they'll take nothing more from me, they
can
take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is still there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. But as long as life is there it will make its own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not.

*

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.

He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long – his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way.

Erich Maria Remarque
was born in Osnabruck, Germany, in 1898. He was conscripted into the German Army in 1915 and transferred to the Western Front. In combat in July 1917 he received multiple shrapnel wounds and was repatriated to a military hospital.
All Quiet on the Western Front
was written in 1927 but not published till 1929 as Remarque was not immediately able to find a publisher. The book was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and, along with his works, burned in public. That year Remarque and his wife fled to Porto Ronco in Switzerland. During the Second World War, the Nazis arrested his sister, Elfriede Scholz. She was beheaded in December 1943. The Court President declared at the trial: ‘Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach – you, however, will not escape us.' The Remarques spent the war in the United States and returned to Porto Ronco in 1948. He died there in 1970.

All Quiet
was an instant success: in its first eighteen months in print it sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages. The film adaptation directed by Lewis Milestone won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1930. The book is a sympathetic portrayal of male camaraderie; it conveys the soldiers' ability to steal moments of pleasure on the front. It is also the moving declaration of a lost generation.

PERMISSIONS

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*

Extracts from Vera Brittain's
Testament of Youth
are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and Timothy Brittain-Catlin, literary executors for the Vera Brittain Estate; Mulk Raj Anand
Across the Black Waters
© Oriental Paperbacks; Siegfried Sassoon
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
© Faber and Faber; Mary Borden
The Forbidden Zone
© Patrick Aylmer; Gabriel Chevallier
Fear
© Le Dilettante; Emilio Lussu
A Soldier on the Southern Front
© Giovanni Lussu; Wyndham Lewis
Blasting and Bombardiering
© Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust; Richard Aldington
Death of a Hero
© Penguin Books; Stratis Myrivilis
Life in the Tomb
© Quartet Books; Raymond Escholier
Mahmadou Fofana
© Françoise Escholier-Achard; Robert Musil
The Blackbird
, translation from the German by Peter Wortsman, from
Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
by Robert Musil © Archipelago Books; Liviu Rebreanu
The Forest of the Hanged
© Peter Owen Books; Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier
Å 
vejk
trans. © Cecil Parrott; Miroslav Krleža
The Croatian God Mars
©HDP Croatian Writers' Society; Viktor Shklovsky
A Sentimental Journey
© Cornell University Press; Ernst Jünger
War Diary 1914–1918
© Klett-Cotta; Jules Romains
The Prelude to Verdun
© Knopf; Jean Giono
To the Slaughterhouse
© Peter Owen Books; Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of the Night
© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, trans. © Ralph Manheim; Isaac Babel
The Complete Works
© W. W. Norton;Willa Cather
One of Ours
© Little, Brown UK, Knopf US; Irene Rathbone
We that Were Young
© Nicholas Utechin; Rose Macaulay
Non-Combatants and Others
© Capuchin Classics; Josep Pla
The Grey Notebook
© New York Review of Books; A. P. Herbert
The Secret Battle
© Frontline Books;Vahan Totovents
Scenes from an Armenian Childhood
©Mischa Kudian; James Hanley
The German Prisoner
© The James Hanley Estate;Theodor Plievier
The Kaiser's Coolies
© Kiwi Verlag; Arnold Zweig
The Case of Sergeant Grischa
© Carlton Books; Joseph Roth
The Radetzky March
© Granta Books; Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front
© Random House; Prežihov Voranc
Doberdob
© Copyright Agency of Slovenia; Carlo Emilio Gadda
Journals of War and Prison
© Garzanti Books.

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