The Road Back

"
THE ROAD BACK
is not just a sequel to
All Quiet on the Western Front
. It is its necessary completion. Even more than the earlier book it shows how much more was lost in the war than men billed in action. There is immense power in its quiet sadness ... the book's fine human truths have a touching and tragic value. This book is a noble book, and like
All Quiet on the Western Front
it deserves and will have a world-audience."

—Christopher Morley

The Saturday Review of Literature

"Remarque has given the most powerful handling it has had to the story of the soldier in the post-war years ... A finer book than
All Quiet on the Western Front"

—
The New York Times

"A painfully moving document Herr Remarque is an extremely powerful writer . . ."

—
Spectator

W
hat is still left of No. 2 Platoon is quartered in a stretch of battered trench behind the line, and most of them are dozing.

"Funny sort of shell " says Jupp suddenly.

"What d'you mean?" asks Ferdinand Kosole, sitting up.

"Use your ears!" answers Jupp.

Kosole puts a hand to his ear and listens. We also listen into the darkness. But there is nothing audible beyond the dull rumour of gun-fire and the high piping of the shells. From the right sounds the rattle of machine-guns and now and then a cry. But all these we have known some years now; there is nothing in that to make a new song about.

Kosole looks at Jupp suspiciously.

"It's stopped now, of course," says Jupp, by way of defending himself.

Kosole looks him over once more, appraisingly. Jupp remains unperturbed, so he turns away, muttering: "It's the rumble in your own hungry guts; that's all your shells are. Best thing you can do is get an eyeful of sleep." He knocks up a sort of earthen headrest and stretches out, disposing himself cautiously so that his boots shall not slip down into the water. "God, and there's the missus and a bed for two at home!" he murmurs, his eyes already closed.

"Somebody else is in it by now, I dare say," retorts Jupp out of his corner.

Kosole opens one eye and gives him a hard look. For a moment it seems as if he meant to get up again. "Don't you be too funny, you poor fish!" And he is snoring already.

Jupp signs to me to crawl over to him. I step across Adolf Bethke's legs and sit down beside him. With a sidelong glance at the snoring figure he says sourly: "The likes of that don't even know what education is."

Jupp was a clerk in a solicitor's office in Cologne before the war. And though he has been soldiering three years now, he still feels himself superior, and in most curious wise sets great store on education out here at the Front. What that means exactly, he does not know himself, of course; but more than all else that he ever heard tell of in the days gone by, the word Education has stayed with him; and to that he clings, as it were a plank in the sea, that he shall not go under. Everybody has something of the sort: this one a wife, another his business, a third his boots, Valentin Laher his schnapps and Tjaden the hope of tasting broad beans and bacon once more.

On the other hand there is nothing so irritates Kosole as that very word, Education. He always connects it some way or another with the idea of high collars, and for him that is enough. Even now it has its effect. Without interrupting his sleep: "Bloody pen-pusher!" says he gruffly.

Jupp shakes his head, resigned and pitying. We sit on in silence a while, side by side to warm ourselves. The night is wet and cold, clouds are driving overhead, and it rains off and on. Then we take up the waterproof on which we are sitting and, while the rain lasts hang it over pur heads.

Along the skyline are the flashes of gun-fire. One feels that over there must be a region a little less cold, it looks so cosy. Like gaily coloured and silver flowers the flares spring up above the lightning flashes of the artillery. Big and red the moon swims in the wet air over the ruins of a farm.

"Think we're going home?" whispers Jupp.

I shrug my shoulders. "The rumour is —— "

Jupp sighs aloud. "A warm room and a sofa, and going out of nights—can you picture it still?"

"I tried on my civvies last time I was on leave," I say meditatively, "but they're ever so much too small for me now—I'll have to get new things." How marvellous that all sounds here—civvies, a sofa, the evening—but it brings strange thoughts too—like black coffee, when sometimes it tastes too much of the tin and rust of the dixie, and one coughs it up again, hot and choking.

Jupp is picking his nose absently. "Shop windows—and cafés—and women—oh, boy!"

"Ach, man, you just be thankful you're back here out of the shit for a bit," I say, and blow into my frozen hands.

"That's true." Jupp draws the waterproof up over his thin, bent shoulders. "What'll you do when you get out of this?"

I laugh. "I? I'll have to go back to school again, I suppose. Willy and Albert and I—and even Ludwig over there, too," I say, pointing back to where someone is lying before a dugout entrance, under two greatcoats.

"Good Lord! But you won't do that, surely?" exclaims Jupp.

"I don't know. Probably have to," I reply, and feel furious, without knowing why.

There is a movement under the greatcoats. A pale, thin face lifts up and groans softly. It is my schoolmate, Lieutenant Ludwig Breyer, our platoon commander. He has had diarrhoea for weeks—it is dysentery, of course, but he does not want to go back into hospital. He would sooner stay here with us, for we are all waiting now in hopes of peace; then we shall be able to take him back with us at once— The hospitals are all full to overflowing, no one is properly looked after there, and once a man lies down on it, he is only so much nearer to being dead. Men die all around one. It gets on a fellow's nerves, alone there among it all, and before he knows where he is he has made another himself.—Max Weil, our stretcher bearer, has given Breyer a sort of fluid plaster to eat, so as to cement up his bowels and stay him for a bit. But even so he has his trousers down twenty and thirty times a day.

And now he must go again. I assist him round the corner and he squats down.

Jupp signs to me. "Listen! There it is again!"

"What?"

"The shells I was talking about before."

Kosole stirs and yawns. He gets up, significantly examines his great fist, he looks askance at Jupp and says: "Well, my boy, if you're trying to pull our leg again, you'll soon be sending your bones home in a turnip sack."

We listen. The hiss and whistle of the invisible, arching shells is interrupted by a queer, hoarse, long-drawn sound, so strange and new that my flesh creeps.

"Gas shells!" shouts Willy, springing up.

We are all awake now and listening intently.

Wessling points into the air. "There they are! Wild geese!"

Moving darkly against the drab grey of the clouds is a streak, a wedge, its point steering toward the moon. It cuts across its red disc. The black shadows are plainly visible, an angle of many wings, a column of squalling, strange, wild cries, that loses itself in the distance.

"Off they go," growls Willy. "Damn it all—if only we could pull out like that! Two wings and away."

Heinrich Wessling follows the geese with his eyes. "Now for winter," says he slowly. Wessling is a farmer and understands these things.

Breyer, weak and wretched, leans against the parados and murmurs: "First time I ever saw that."

But Kosole has brightened up at once. He gets Wessling to explain the matter to him quickly once more, asking particularly whether wild geese are as fat as tame ones.

"More or less," says Wessling.

"My poor belly!" exclaims Kosole, his jaws working with excitement. "And fifteen, twenty maybe, good roast dinners flying about there in the air!"

Again the whirr of wings straight above us; again the hoarse, throaty cry swooping down into our hearts like a hawk; the lapping pulse of their wings, the urgent cries, gusts of the rising wind all united in one passionate, swift sense of freedom and life.

A shot rings out. Kosole lowers his rifle and peers hungrily into the sky. He has fired into the middle of the flight. Beside him stands Tjaden, ready like a retriever, to dash out should a goose fall. But the flight passes on intact.

"Hard luck," says Bethke. "That might have been the first sensible shot in this whole lousy war."

Kosole throws down his rifle in disgust. "If only a man had some shot-cartridges!" He settles back into gloom, conjuring all the things that might have been. And as he sits, he chews unconsciously.

"Yes," says Jupp, observing him, "with apple sauce and baked potatoes, what?"

Kosole looks at him poisonously. "You shut up, you pen-pusher!"

"You should have joined the Air Force," grins Jupp, "then you might still have gone after them with a butterfly net."

"Arseholes!" answers Kosole finally, and settles down to sleep once more. And that is best. The rain becomes heavier. We sit back to back and drape our waterproof-sheets over us. Like dark mounds of earth we squat there in our little bit of trench. Earth, uniform, and a little life underneath.

A harsh whispering wakes me. "Forward!—Forward!"

"Why, what's the matter?" I ask, drunken with sleep.

"We've to go up the line," growls Kosole, assembling his things.

"But we've only just come here!" I say, mystified.

"Such damned rot," I hear Wessling cursing. "The bloody war's over, isn't it?"

"Up! Forward!" It is Heel himself, our company commander, driving us out. He is running impatiently down the trench. Ludwig Breyer is already on his feet. "There's nothing for it, we've got to go," says he resignedly, taking a few hand-grenades.

Adolf Bethke looks at him. "You should stay here,
Ludwig. You can't go up with your dysentery "

Breyer shakes his head.

The scraping sound of belts being tightened, a clatter of rifles, the sickly smell of death suddenly rises up again out of the earth. And we had hoped at last to have escaped it for ever!

The thought of Peace had sprung up before us like a rocket, and though indeed we did not yet believe nor understand it, the bare hope had sufficed to change us more in the few minutes it took for the rumour to circulate, than in twenty months before. Till now the years of war had succeeded each other, year laid upon year, one year of hopelessness treading fast upon another, and when a man reckoned the time, his amazement was almost as great to discover it had been so long, as that it had been only so long. But now that it has become known peace may come any day, every hour has gained in weight a thousandfold, every minute under fire seems harder and longer almost than the whole time before.

The wind miaows round the remains of the breast-works and clouds draw swiftly over the moon—light constantly alternating with shadow. We march close one behind another, a group of shadows, a sorry spectacle, No. 2 Platoon shot to a mere handful of men—the whole company has scarce the strength of a normal platoon—but this remnant is choice, thoroughly sifted. We have even three old timers still from 'fourteen—Bethke, Wessling, and Kosole, who know everything, and often speak of the first months as though that were away back in the olden days of the gods and the heroes.

Each man seeks out a corner, a hole for himself in the new position. There is nothing much doing. Flares, machine-guns, rats. With a well-aimed kick Willy tosses one up and slices it in two in mid-air with one cut from a spade.

A few scattered shots fall. From the left sounds distantly the explosion of hand-grenades.

"Let's hope it stays quiet here," says Wessling.

"To get it in the neck now!" Willy shakes his head.

"When a man's luck is out, he'll break his finger just picking his nose," growls Valentin.

Ludwig lies down on his waterproof-sheet. He could, as a matter of fact, have stayed behind. Weil gives him a couple of tabloids and Valentin tries to persuade him to have a nip of schnapps. Ledderhose starts to tell some smutty yarn, but no one listens. We lie around and the time creeps on.

I start suddenly and lift my head. Bethke too, I see, is sitting up. Even Tjaden is on the alert. The year-old instinct has reported something, none yet knows what, but certainly something strange is afoot. We raise our heads gingerly and listen, our eyes narrowed to slits to penetrate the darkness. Everyone is awake, every sense is strained to the uttermost, every muscle ready to receive the unknown, oncoming thing that can mean only danger. The hand-grenades scrape over the ground as Willy, our best bomb-thrower, worms himself forward. We lie close pressed to the ground, like cats. Beside me I discover Ludwig Breyer. There is nothing of sickness in his tense features now. His is the same cold, deathly expression as everyone's here, the front-line face. A fierce tension has frozen it—so extraordinary is the impression that our subconsciousness has imparted to us, long before our senses are able to identify the cause of it.

The fog moves and lifts. And suddenly I know what it is that has thrown us all into such a state of alarm. It has merely become still. Absolutely still.

Not a machine-gun, not a shot, not an explosion; no shriek of shells, nothing, absolutely nothing, no shot, no cry. It is simply still, utterly still.

We look at one another; we cannot understand it. This
is the first time it has been so quiet since we have been at
the Front. We sniff the air and try to figure what it can
mean. Is gas creeping over? But the wind is not favour
able, it would drive it off. Is an attack coming? But the 
very silence would have betrayed it already. What is it, 
then? The bomb in my hand is moist, I am sweating so
with excitement. One feels as if the nerves must snap. Five 
minutes. Ten minutes. "A quarter of an hour now," calls
Laher. His voice sounds hollow in the fog as from a grave. 
Still nothing happens, no attack, no sudden, dark-looming, 
springing shadows