The Road Back (36 page)

Already they are breaking cover from the undergrowth in front of us; they run to the edge of the wood and throw themselves on the ground. "Range four hundred!" snaps the same voice as before. "Covering fire—Fire!"

A rattling clatter. A long line of sixteen and eighteen-year-old boys lying side by side along the edge of the wood. They all wear waterproof jackets with leather girdles buckled about them like soldiers, belts. All are dressed alike, grey jackets, puttees, caps with badges—uniformity has been deliberately emphasised. Each has a walking-stick with a steel point, with which he is battering on the tree-trunks in imitation of machine-gun fire.

But from under the warlike caps there look out young, red-cheeked children's faces. Watchful and excited they peer away to the right in search of approaching cavalry. They do not see the tender miracle of the violet among the brown leaves—nor the purple bloom of the coming spring that lies over the ploughed fields—nor the downy, soft fur of the leveret that is hopping there along the furrows— Ah, yes, they do see the leveret!—but they are aiming their sticks at it and the clatter on the tree-trunks swells mightily. Behind them stands a powerful fellow with a bit of a paunch, also in waterproof jacket and puttees. He beefs out his commands: "Slow fire! Two hundred yards!" He has a pair of spy-glasses and is observing the enemy.

"Holy Jesus!" I exclaim in horror.

Kosole has recovered from his astonishment. "What sort of bloody nonsense do you call this?" he growls.

But he lands himself in hot waters. The leader, who is now joined by two confreres, glares and thunders. The soft spring air is loud with bold words. "Shut your mugs, you damned shirkers! You enemies to the Fatherland! You dirty push of traitors!"

The boys now join in eagerly. One shakes his small fist. "We'll have to give you a good hiding!" he pipes up in his high-pitched voice. "Cowards!" chimes in another. "Pacifists!" cries a third. "These Bolsheviks must all be rooted out, or Germany will never be free!" shouts a fourth glibly and pat.

"That's right!" The leader pats him on the shoulder and makes toward us. "Run them off, lads!"

At that moment Willy wakes up. He has been asleep until now. He is still a good soldier in that: if he lies down for long he at once goes to sleep.

He stands up. The leader pulls up short at once. Willy looks about him in surprise and explodes into laughter. "What's this? A fancy dress ball?" he asks. Then he grasps the situation. "Well, well—so there you are!" he growls at the leader, "we've been wondering what had become of you for a hell of a time now! Yes, yes, I know, the Fatherland —it's all yours, by deed of settlement, what? And everyone else is a traitor, what? Funny thing then, that three quarters of the German Army were traitors. Just you hop off now, you jackanapes! Why can't you let the kids enjoy the few years that are left to them, while they need still know nothing about it?"

The leader draws off his army—But the wood is spoiled for us. We go back into the village. Behind us, rhythmical and syncopated, echoes the cry: "Frontheill Frontheil! Frontheil!"

"Frontheil——" Willy clutches his hair. "If anyone had said that to the lads up the line!"

"Yes," says Kosole sourly, "so it begins all over 
again——"

Just outside the village we find a little beer garden where
already there are a few tables standing out in the open.
Though Valentin is due back at his swingboats in an hour, 
we still sit ourselves down for a quick one, to make the best
of our time—for who knows when we shall be together 
again——

A pale sunset is colouring the sky. I cannot help think
ing still of that scene back in the wood. "My God, Willy,"
I say, "here we are alive still and only just out of it—how
in God's name is it possible there should already be such
people to do that sort of thing——"

"There will always be such people," answers Willy unusually earnest and thoughtful, "but don't forget us, we are here, too. And there's a lot of people think as we do. Most of them, probably. Ever since then—you know, since Ludwig and Albert—all sorts of things have been going round in my head, and I've come to the conclusion that everybody can do something in his own way, even though he may have nothing but a turnip for a head. My holidays are over next week, and I'll have to go back to the village as a school-teacher again. And, you know, I'm positively glad of it. I mean to teach my youngsters what their Fatherland really is. Their homeland, that is, not a political party. Their homeland is trees, fields, earth, none of your fulsome catchwords. I've considered it all off and on a long time, and I've decided that we're old enough now to do some sort of a job. And that's mine. It's not big, I admit. But sufficient for me—and I'm no Goethe, of course."

I nod and look at him a long while. Then we set off.

The chauffeur is waiting for us. The car glides softly
through the slowly gathering twilight. We are already ap
proaching the town and the first lights have shown up
when there mingles with the crunching and grinding of the
tyres a long-drawn, hoarser, throaty sound—in an easterly
direction across the evening sky there moves a wedge-
shaped flight—a flock of wild geese——

We look at it——Kosole is about to say something, but then is silent. We are all thinking the same thing. Then 
comes the town with streets and noise. Valentin climbs
out. Then Willy. Then Kosole——

I was in the wood the whole day. Weary now, I have turned in at a little country inn and taken a room for the night. The bed is already open, but I do not want to sleep yet. I sit down in the window and listen to the stirrings of the spring night.

Shadows flit about among the trees and up from the woods come cries, as though wounded were lying there. I look quietly and composedly out into the darkness, for I am afraid of the past no longer. I look into its quenched eyes without flinching. I even go out to meet it, I send my thoughts back into the dugouts, and shell-holes—but when they return they bring back neither fear nor horror with them, but only strength and will.

I have awaited a storm that should deliver me, pluck
me away—and now it has come softly, even without my
knowledge. But it is here. While I was despairing thinking
everything lost, it was already quietly growing. I had
thought that division was always an end. Now I know
that growth also is division. And growth means relinquish
ing. And growth has no end——

One part of my life was given over to the service of destruction; it belonged to hate, to enmity, to killing. But life remained in me. And that in itself is enough, of itself almost a purpose and a way. I will work in myself and be ready; I will bestir my hands and my thoughts. I will not take myself very seriously, nor push on when sometimes I should like to be still. There are many things to be built and almost everything to repair; it is enough that I work to dig out again what was buried during the years of shells and machine-guns. Not everyone need be a pioneer—there is employment for feebler hands, lesser powers. It is there I mean to look for my place. Then the dead will be silenced and the past not pursue me any more—it will assist me instead.

How simple it is—but how long it has taken to arrive there! And I might still be wandering in the wilderness, have fallen victim to the wire snares and the detonators, had Ludwig's death not gone up before us like a rocket, lighting to us the way. We despaired when we saw how that great steam of feeling common to us all—that will to a new life shorn of follies, a life recaptured on the confines of death—did not sweep away before it all surviving half-truth and self-interest, so to make a new course for itself,
but instead of that merely trickled away in the marshes of forgetfulness, was lost among the bogs of fine phrases, and dribbled away along the ditches of social activities, of cares and occupations. But today I know that all life is perhaps only a getting ready, a ferment in the individual, in many cells, in many channels, each for himself—and if the cells and channels of a tree but take up and carry farther the onward urging sap, there will emerge at last rustling and sunlit branches, crowns of leaves, and freedom. I will begin.

It will not be that consummation of which we dreamed in our youth and that we expected after the years out there. It will be a road like other roads, with stones and good stretches, with places torn up, with villages and fields—a road of toil. And I shall be alone. Perhaps sometimes I shall find someone to go with me a stage of the journey— but for all of it, probably no one.

And I may often have to hump my pack still, when my shoulders are already weary; often hesitate at the cross-ways and boundaries, often have to leave something behind me, often stumble and fall—but I will get up again and not just lie there, I will go on and not look back. Perhaps I shall never be really happy again, perhaps the war has destroyed that, and no doubt I shall always be a little inattentive and nowhere quite at homes—but I shall probably never be wholly unhappy either—for something will always be there to sustain me, be it merely my own hands, or a tree, or the breathing earth.

The sap mounts in the stems, the buds burst with faint noises, and the darkness is full of the sound of growth.There is night in the room, and the moon. There is life in the room. It creaks in the furniture, the table cracks and the wardrobe also. Many years ago someone felled these and split them, planed them and worked them into things of utility, into chairs and beds—but each springtime, in the darkness of the sap, it stirs and reverberates in them again, they waken, they stretch themselves, mere objects of use no longer, no longer chairs for a purpose; once again they have part in the streaming and flowing outside. The boards under my feet creak and move of themselves, the wood of the window-sill cracks under my hands, and in front of the door even the splintered, decaying trunk of a lime tree by the road side is thrusting out fat, brown buds. In a few weeks it too will have little silken green leaves, as surely as the wide spreading branches of the plane-tree overshadowing it.