The Road Back (21 page)

"That's so," I say.

The blood of the old army Kosole is mounting again in Kosole the civilian. He takes colour and force again.

"It would have been a pity otherwise," he assures me energetically, and now, just as Tjaden strolls by to make another wry face, without a word and without shifting on his seat Kosole plants one superbly aimed kick. He is his old self again.

The door into the main hall has started banging. The first of the boys are coming. We go in. The empty room with the paper garlands and tables still unset, gives a disagreeable impression. A few groups are standing about in corners. I discover Julius Weddekamp in his faded old military tunic and hastily push aside a few chairs and go to greet him.

"How goes it, Julius?" I say. "Haven't forgotten you owe
me a mahogany cross, I hope, have you? You wanted to 
make me one out of a piano lid, remember? Bear it in mind, 
old turnip——"

"I might have done with it myself, Ernst," he said gloomily. "You know my wife died?"

"Damn it, Julius, but I'm sorry to hear that," I say. "What was the trouble?"

He shrugs his shoulders. "Knocked herself out with the everlasting standing about in queues outside the shops all the winter. Then a baby came, and that finished her."

"And the baby?" I ask.

"Died too." He hunches his drooping shoulders as if he were freezing. "Yes, and Scheffler's dead too, Ernst—you knew that, I suppose?"

I shake my head. "How did that happen?" Weddekamp lights his pipe. "He got a crack in the head, you know; 1917, wasn't it? Anyway, it healed up all right at the time. Then about six weeks ago he suddenly developed such awful bloody pains that he kept running his head against the wall. It took four of us to get him off to the hospital. Inflammation or something. He pegged out the next day." He takes a second match. "Yes, and now they don't want to give his wife a pension!"

"And Gerhard Pohl?" I inquire.

"He can't come—Fassbender and Fritsch neither. Out of work. Not even enough money for the grub. They would like to have come, too, the old boys."

The room has about half filled in the meantime. We meet many others of our old pals, but it is strange—the old spirit is missing. And we have been looking forward to this reunion for weeks, hoping it would clear up for us all sorts of worries, and uncertainties and misunderstandings. Perhaps it is because of the civilian clothes sprinkled about everywhere among the military togs—or maybe that profession, and family, and social standing, like so many wedges, have split us asunder; but certain it is, the old feeling of comradeship has gone.

Everything is topsy-turvy. There is Bosse, for instance, the standing joke of the whole company, who was always having japes played on him because he was such a poor fool. Out there he used to be so filthy dirty and rotten, that more than once we had to put him under the pump. And now here he is sitting among us in a flash, worsted suit, with a pearl tie-pin and spats, quite a well-to-do fellow with a big line of talk. And beside him is Adolf Bethke, who towered above him so out there that he was glad if Bethke would so much as speak to him. And yet Bethke is now suddenly nothing but a poor village cobbler with a bit of farm-holding. And Ludwig Breyer, instead of a lieutenant's uniform he now wears a shiny, too tight-fitting school-suit with a boy's knitted cravat tied askew round his neck; and his former batman is slapping him familiarly on the back, once more the plumber in a large way of business in water-closet fittings, and owner of fine premises on the main business street. Then there is Valentin—under his ragged, open tunic is an old blue-and-white sweater. He looks like a tramp, but, my God, what a soldier!—and Ledderhose, the dirty dog, sitting there alongside him, full of importance in a shiny top hat, and a canary-yellow mackintosh, and smoking English cigarettes.—It is all turned bottom up!

Still, that might pass. But even the talk is different, and that derives from the clothes too. Fellows who formerly wouldn't have said booh to a goose are now playing the heavy uncle. The men with good clothes have a patronising air, and those with shabby ones are for the most part silent. A schoolmaster, who was formerly a corporal and a bad one at that, condescends to ask Karl and Ludwig about their examination. If I were Ludwig I'd pour my beer down his neck. Karl, thank Heaven! makes a few unflattering remarks about education and examinations and the rest of it, and extols business and trade, instead.

The talk here makes me quite ill. I would rather we had never come together again—then at least we might still have preserved a memory. In vain do I try to picture all these fellows in dirty uniforms again, and this Konersmann's Restaurant as a canteen in the rest area. It cannot be done. The things here are stronger—the things that differentiate us from one another are too powerful. The common interest is no longer decisive. It has broken up already, and given place to the interest of the individual. Now and then something still will shine through from that other time when we all wore the same rig, but already it is diminished and dim. These others here are still our comrades, and yet our comrades no longer—that is what is so sad. All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe, in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving—it is driving us asunder.

But we are unwilling to believe it. We all sit down at one table together—Ludwig, Albert, Karl, Adolf, Willy, Tjaden, Valentin. A feeling of gloom is over us.

"Anyway, we'll stick together," says Albert glancing toward the big room. We agree and shake hands on it, whilst over yonder the good clothes are already beginning to draw their chairs closer together. We do not mean to be party to this reclassification. We will start with what the others are discarding. "Come on, Adolf," I say to Bethke, "join in too." He lays his great paw on our hands and for the first time in many a day he is smiling again.

We sit there together a while, but  Adolf Bethke soon goes. He looks rather bad. I remind myself that I must go and see him one of these days.

A waiter appears and whispers something to Tjaden. He dismisses him with a shake of the head—"Ladies have no business here." We look up in surprise. Tjaden smiles, flattered. The waiter returns, and behind him, with quick strides, comes a great, strapping wench. Tjaden is taken aback. We grin. But no, he knows how to look after himself. He makes a grand gesture: "My fiancée."

For Tjaden that ends the matter, so Willy undertakes the further introductions. He begins with Ludwig and ends up with himself. Then he invites the girl to be seated. She does so. Willy sits down beside her and rests his arm along the back of her chair. "Your father is the famous butcher at Neuengraben, I believe?" he says by way of opening the conversation.

The girl nods. Willy draws up closer. That does not worry Tjaden in the slightest. He laps up his beer contentedly. But under Willy's gay and insistent talk the young lady begins to thaw.

"I've so much wanted to meet you gentlemen," she tells us. "Dearie has told me so often about you, but whenever I asked him to bring you out he never would."

"What?" says Willy, annihilating Tjaden with a glance, "bring us out? But of course, we should be awfully pleased, really most extraordinarily pleased to come. The old rascal, he never said a word of it to us!"

Tjaden begins to show signs of uneasiness. Kosole leans forward. "So Dearie, has often told you about us, has he? And what has he told you exactly, I wonder?"

"We must be going now, Mariechen," Tjaden breaks in, making to rise. But Kosole pushes him down again into his chair. "Pray, be seated, Dearie. What did he tell you, now, Fräulein?"

Mariechen is utterly confiding. She looks at Willy coyly: "Would you be Herr Homeyer?" Willy bows to the Butchery. "Then it was you that he saved?" she prattles on, while Tjaden fidgets in his chair as if he were seated on an ant-heap. "But you haven't forgotten, surely?"

Willy holds bis head. "I was buried afterwards, you know," he explains. "And that plays the very deuce with a man's memory I It was most unfortunate. Such a lot of things slipped my memory then."

"Saved?" asked Kosole eagerly.

"I'm going, Mariechen; are you coming or aren't you?" says Tjaden. Kosole holds him fast.

"He is so shy," giggles Mariechen beaming. "And first he had to kill three negroes who wanted to butcher Herr Homeyer with their tomahawks! One of them with his fist, too——"

"With his fist," repeats Kosole in a hollow voice.

"Yes, and the rest with their own tomahawks! And then afterwards he carried you back." Mariechen surveys Willy's six feet five and a half inches and nods approbation of her fiancé. "There's no harm in telling for once of what you did, Dearie."

"No, indeed!" agreed Kosole. "It's a thing that ought to be told, once."

For a moment Willy gazes deliciously into Mariechen's eyes. "Yes, he's a wonderful fellow!" he assures her. Then he nods across at Tjaden. "Just come outside with me a moment."

Tjaden rises dubiously. But Willy means no harm. A few minutes later the two reappear arm in arm. Willy stoops down to Mariechen: "Well, so that's settled—I'll be calling round tomorrow evening. I have still to thank him for rescuing me from those negroes—— But, you know, I saved your fiancé once, too."

"No! Did you really?" says Mariechen astonished.

"Perhaps he'll tell you about that, too, some day," grins Willy. With a sigh of relief Tjaden now steams out with his lady.

"You see, they're slaughtering to-morrow," says Willy.— But nobody is listening. We have had to control ourselves too long already, and we burst into shrieks of laughter, whinneying like a stableful of starved horses. Kosole almost makes himself sick, he shakes so. It is long before Willy can tell us what a very advantageous contract he has been able to make with Tjaden for a steady supply of horse-sausage. "I've got the old man in the hollow of my hand," he grins.

I sat at home all the afternoon and tried to do something, but nothing has come of it. For an hour already I have been roaming aimlessly through the streets. In the course of my patrolling I go past the new restaurant, the Holländische Diele. This is the third gin shop to go up within the last three weeks. These things with their gay placards are springing up like mushrooms everywhere among the houses. The Holländische Diele is the largest and flashiest.

Before the illuminated glass door stands a porter, looking like a cross between a bishop and a colonel of the hussars, an enormous fellow with a gilded baton in his hand. I catch his eye—suddenly his dignity deserts him, and he prods me in the stomach with his club and grins: "Hullo, Ernst, you old scarecrow! Commong sa va, as the Frenchman says."

It is Corporal Anton Demuth, some time our sergeant-cook. I salute smartly; in the army we were always being told that salutes should be given to the uniform, not to the wearer. But this trick uniform here is very high class indeed, it calls for a bow at the least.

"Hullo, Anton!" I laugh. "But to get down to business, have you got anything to eat?"

"Bet your life," he answers affirmatively. "Franz Elstermann, remember Franz? lie's here in this syrup-shop too. He's the cook!"

"And what time did you say I should call?" I ask, for that in itself is sufficient recommendation. Elstermann and Demuth were the prize scroungers of all France.

"Some time after one, tonight," says Anton, giving me a wink. "We've just scored a dozen or so geese off a Food Officer Inspector—hush goods, you know. You can bet your life Elstermann will amputate a few of them first. After all, who's to say geese don't have wars where they might lose a leg or so, eh?"

"Nobody," I say. "Get much business here?"

"Packed to the doors every night. Take a look in."

He pulls the curtain a little to one side and through a chink I peer into the room. Soft, warm light over the tables, long trailers of bluish cigar smoke floating through it, carpets glowing, shining porcelain, gleaming silver. Women seated at the tables, surrounded by waiters, and men beside them who do not appear to be sweating in the least, nor are they even embarrassed. With what wonderful self-possession they give their orders!

"Well, my lad, how would you like to have one of them on the switchback, eh?" asks Anton prodding me again in the ribs.

I do not answer; this rich, colourful glimpse of life touches me strangely. There is something almost unreal in it, as if I only dreamed that I stood here on the dark street in the slushing snow and saw through the chink of a door this strange scene. It enchants me—though of course it is nothing, merely a few profiteers disgorging their money. But we lay too long out there in filthy holes under the ground not to feel sometimes a passionate, almost insane craving for luxury and elegance surge up in us—for does not luxury mean to be sheltered, to be cared for?—and that is the one thing we have had no knowledge of.

"Well, lad, what d'you think?" asks Anton again. "Nice soft little pussies to go to bed with, what?"