The Road Back (12 page)

I am rather embarrassed. Too many people for me, too many women and, worst of all, too much light. The most we ever had up the line was an oil lamp. But these chandeliers here, they are as merciless as bailiffs. One can hide nothing from them—I scratch my back uncomfortably.

"But what are you doing?" says my aunt, interrupting her talk.

"Oh, it's probably just a louse that has escaped," I ex
plain. "We had so many of them, you know, it will take at 
least a week, before a man is rid of them all "

She steps back, horrified. "Nothing to be frightened of," I reassure her. "They don't hop. They're no fleas."

"For heaven's sake!" She puts a finger to her lips and makes a face, as if I had uttered God only knows what obscenity—But then they are like that. Heroes we may be, but one mustn't mention one word about lice.

I have to shake hands with a lot of people and begin to perspire. The men here are quite different from us out there. I feel as cumbersome as a tank in comparison. They behave as if they were sitting in a shop window, and talk as if they were on the stage. I try cautiously to hide my hands; the grime of the trenches is ground into them like poison. I dry them off surreptitiously on my trousers; but they are immediately wet again when I have to shake hands with a lady.

I work my way round and come on a group where a chartered accountant is airing his views. "Just think of it!" he is saying, all worked up. "A saddler! A saddler, mind you, and President of the Empire! Imagine it, a court levee and a saddler giving audience! It would make a cat laugh!"

It makes him cough, he is so excited. "What do you think about it, my young warrior?" he says, patting me on the shoulder.

As a matter of fact I have never given the matter a
thought. I shrug my shoulders doubtfully. "Perhaps he
knows a thing "

The accountant looks at me fixedly a moment. Then he chuckles. "I should say he does know a thing or twol No, no, my young friend, these things are inborn I A saddler! If so, then why not a tailor or a cobbler even?"

He turns again to the others. I dislike his talk; it goes against my grain to hear him speak so contemptuously of cobblers. They made as good soldiers as the finer folk, anyway. Adolf Bethke was a cobbler, for that matter—and he knew a sight more about war than a good many majors. It was the man that counted with us, not his occupation—I eye the accountant dispraisingly. He is throwing about quotations now, and it may well be that he has ladled in culture with a spoon—but if it ever came to that again and someone had to bring me in under fire, I would sooner put my trust in Adolf Bethke.

I am glad when at last we sit down to table. Beside me is a young girl with a swan's-down boa round her neck. I like the look of her, but have not the faintest idea what I should talk to her about. As a soldier one did not talk much, and to ladies not at all. The others are conversing freely, so I try to listen in the hope of picking up an idea or two.

Further up the table the accountant has just been explaining how, if only we had held out a bit longer, the war would have been won. Such bilge makes me almost sick; any soldier knows that we had no more munitions and no more men—and that's all there is about it. Opposite him is a woman talking about her husband who was killed, and from the way she goes on one might think it was she had been killed and not he. Lower down they are talking about securities and peace terms, and all of them, of course, know much better what should be done than the people who actually have to deal with the matter. A fellow with a hook nose is talking scandal about the wife of a friend of his, but with an air of such sanctimonious sham sympathy, I should like to pitch my beer into his face as a reward for such ill-concealed malice.

All the talk makes me stupid in the head, and I am soon quite unable to follow it any longer. The girl with the swan boa asks scornfully whether I became dumb out at the Front.

"Not entirely," I answer, and think to myself: I only wish Kosole and Tjaden could sit here among you. How they would laugh, to hear the flapdoodle you peddle and so pride yourselves on! All the same it riles me not to be able to show them in one telling thrust what I think. It would not rile Kosole though. He would know well enough what to say. It would be pat and to the point.

At this moment, God be praised! crisp, grilled chops
appear on the table. I sniff. Real pork chops they are,
fried in real fat, too. The sight of them consoles me for all
the rest. I lean over and secure a good one and began
chewing with relish. It tastes marvellous—It's a power of
time since I last ate a fresh chop. In Flanders it was—we
bagged a couple of sucking pigs—we ate them down to the
very ribs, one lovely mild summer evening—Katczinsky was
alive then—ach, Kat—and Haie Westhus—a sight better
they were than these fellows at home here—I prop my
elbows on the table and forget everything around me, so
clearly do I see them before me. Such tender little beasts,
too—we made potato-cakes to go with them—and Leer was
there and Paul Bäumer—yes, Paul—I never hear nor see
anything now, I have lost myself in memories——

A giggle awakes me. About the table is dead silence. Aunt Lina has a face like a bottle of vitriol. The girl beside me is stifling a laugh. Everybody is looking at me.

Sweat breaks out on me in streams. There I sit, just as we did then out in Flanders, absent-minded, both elbows on the table, the bone in my two hands, my fingers covered in grease, gnawing off the last scraps of the chop. But the others are eating cleanly with knife and with fork.

Red as a beetroot I look straight ahead and put down the bone. How could I so have forgotten myself? But, to tell the truth, I hardly know now how else to go about it. We always ate that way at the Front; at the best of times we had only a spoon or a fork, certainly never a plate.

But there is anger too in my embarrassment—anger against this Uncle Karl now beginning to talk so loudly of war loans; anger against all these people here that think so much of themselves and their smart talk; anger against this whole world living here so damned cocksure with their knick-knacks and jiggery-pokery, as though the monstrous years had never been, when one thing and one thing only, mattered—life or death, and beyond that nothing.

Grimly, in silence, I stuff in all I can. I mean at least to be full. Then as soon as I can I make my way out.

In the lobby is the servant in the dress-suit. I reach down my things. "We should have had you up the line, too, you lacquered ape!" I spit. "You and the whole bunch here!" Then I slam to the door.

Wolf has waited for me outside the house. He leaps up on me. "Come, Wolf," I say, and suddenly know that it was not the affair with the chop that made me feel so bitter; but the fact that the same vapid, self-satisfied spirit as of old should still be lording it here and giving itself airs—"Come, Wolfe," I repeat, "those are not our sort. We would get along better with any Tommy, with any front-line Froggy, than with them. Come, let's go to our pals. It's better there, even if they do belch and eat with their hands. Corne!"

We trot along, the dog and I, we run as hard as we can, faster and faster, panting, barking, we run like mad, with shining eyes. To hell with them all! But we live, eh? Wolf! We live!

Ludwig Breyer, Albert Trosske and I are on our way to school. Lessons are to begin again.

We were students at the Teachers' College when the war came, but no special examination was granted to us. The men of the Grammar School who went fared much better. Most of them were able to take a special exam., either before they enlisted or when they came home on leave. The remainder, who did neither the one nor the other, have now to start their schooling again like the rest of us. Karl Bröger is one of these.

We pass by the cathedral. The green sheets of copper that once covered the spire have been taken away and replaced by strips of grey felt. They look mildewed and shabby, so that the church has almost the air of a factory. The sheets of copper were melted down to make shells.

"The Lord God never dreamed of that, I'll bet," says Albert.

In a winding alley to the west of the cathedral stands the two-storeyed Teachers' College. Almost opposite is the Grammar School; behind it the river and the embankment with the lime trees. Before we enlisted these buildings made up our world. After that it was the trenches. Now we are here again. But this is no longer our world; the trenches ousted it. 

In front of the Grammar School we meet our old chum, Georg Rahe. He was a lieutenant and had charge of a company, but on leave he only got drunk and loafed about, and took no thought for his Finals. So now he is going back into Upper Second again, where already he has been twice left behind.

"Is it true, Georg," I ask him, "that you've become such a crack Latin scholar up the line?"

He laughs and stalks off on his long legs to the Grammar School.

"Watch out you don't get a bad conduct mark," I shout after him.

He was an airman for the last six months, and brought down four Englishmen. But I don't believe he can still demonstrate Pythagoras' theorem.

We go on to the Teachers' College. The whole lane is teeming with uniforms. Faces suddenly loom up that one has almost forgotten; names one has not heard of for years. Hans Walldorf hobbles along. We carried him out with a shattered knee in November '17. His leg has been amputated at the hip; now he wears a heavy, jointed, wooden leg, and thumps along on it noisily. Kurt Leipold appears, and introduces himself, laughingly: "Godfrey of the Iron Hand, gentlemen!" He has an artificial right arm. Then someone comes out at the gate and says in a gurgling voice: "You don't recognise me perhaps, eh?"

I study the face, if such it can still be called.—Across the forehead is a broad, red scar that runs down into the left eye. There the flesh has grown over, so that the eye lies buried, deep and small. But it is there still. The right eye is fixed, that is glass. The nose is clean gone, a black patch covers the place. The scar continues below it and splits the mouth in two. The mouth itself is bulbous; the parts have grown together askew—hence the unintelligible speech. The teeth are artificial. A bracket is visible across them. In doubt still, I continue to look at him.—"Paul Rademacher," says the gurgling voice.

I recognise him now. Why yes, of course, the grey suit with the stripes. "Well, Paul! and what have you been doing to yourself?"

"Can't you see?" he says, trying to straighten his lips. "Two cuts with a trenching tool.—And these went with the rest." He shows a hand from which three fingers are missing. His one eye is blinking distressfully. The other looks straight ahead, fixed and unconcerned. "Wish I knew if I could still be a school teacher. My speech is pretty bad, isn't it? Can you understand me?"

"Sure," I answer. "And it will improve, too, as time goes on. Besides, they'll be able to operate on it again later, of course."

He shrugs his shoulders and says nothing. He does not seem very hopeful. If it were possible at all, they would have done so already, no doubt.

Willy barges his way through to us to give us the latest news. Borkmann, we hear, died of his lung-wound after all.

He developed consumption. Henze, too—he shot himself when he found out his spine injury could only end in an invalid's chair for life. No wonder—he used to be our best footballer. Meyer was killed in September; Lichtenfeld in June. Lichtenfeld was only out there two days.

We stop suddenly. A diminutive little figure is standing before us.

"No? not Westerholt?" says Willy incredulously.

"The very same, you old mushroom," he answers.

Willy is staggered. "But you're dead!"

"Not yet," retorts Westerholt amicably.

"But I saw it in the newspaper!"

"That was just a misprint," says Westerholt with a grin.

"A man can't rely on anything these days!" says Willy, shaking his head. "I thought the worms had eaten you long ago!"

"After you, Willy," answers Westerholt complacently. "You'll be the first. Red-haired people never live long."

We go in. The quadrangle, where we used to eat our bread-and-butter at ten o'clock; the class-rooms with the desks and the forms; the corridor with the rows of hat-pegs—all just the same; and yet to us it seems somehow as if they belonged to another world. Only the smell of the gloomy rooms is familiar—not so rank, but still similar to that of the barracks.

The great organ with its hundreds of pipes is gleaming in the hall. To the right stand the masters in a group. On the Principal's desk are two pot plants with coarse, leathery leaves. In front of it hangs a laurel wreath tied with a big ribbon. The Principal is in his frock-coat. So—there's to be a 'Welcome'!