The Road Back (5 page)

I lean across the table and speak to Valentin Laher who is looking the girls over coolly, with a superior air. There is a blonde sitting beside him, but he is paying her little attention. As I lean forward something in my tunic pocket presses against the edge of the table. I feel to find out what it is. Wessling's watch.

Jupp has hooked the fattest dame. He is dancing like a question-mark. His paw lies fiat upon her ample buttocks and is playing the piano there. With moist lips she is smiling up into his face, and he is growing bolder every minute. Finally he waltzes out through the door into the yard and vanishes.

A few minutes later I go out and make for the nearest corner. But already a perspiring sergeant is standing there with a lass. I trundle off into the garden and am just about to begin when there is a terrific crash immediately behind me. I turn round to see Jupp rolling with Fatty on the ground. A garden table has given way beneath them. The fat lady guffaws when she sees me and puts out her tongue. Jupp hisses. I disappear hastily behind some bushes and tread on someone's hand—a hell of a night! "Can't you walk, you clumsy cow?" asks a deep voice.

"How was I to know there was a worm there?" I retort peevishly, moving off to find a quiet corner at last.

A cool wind, very good after the smoke inside there. Dark roofs and gables, boughs overhanging, stillness, and the peaceful plashing as I piddle.

Albert comes and stands beside me. The moon is shining. We piss bright silver.

"Man, but it's good, eh, Ernst?" says Albert.

I nod. We gaze a while into the moon.

"To think that damned show is over, Albert, eh?"

"My bloody oath "

There is creaking and crackling behind us. Girls laugh out clear among the bushes and are as suddenly hushed. The night is like a thunder storm, heavy with fever of life, erupting, wildly and swiftly flashing from one point to another and kindling.

Someone groans in the garden. An answering giggle. Shadows clamber down from the hay loft. Two are standing on a ladder. The man buries his head like a madman among the girl's skirts and stammers something. She laughs in a coarse, loud voice that scrapes over our nerves like a brush. Shudders purl down my back—How near they come together, yesterday and today, death and life!

Tjaden comes up from the dark garden. He is suffused in sweat and his face is glowing: "Boy!" says he, buttoning up his tunic. "Now a man knows again what it is to be alive."

We take a turn round the house and discover Willy Homeyer. He has lit a great fire of weeds in a field and thrown on a few handfuls of scrounged potatoes. Now there he sits alone before it peacefully dreaming, waiting till the potatoes are baked. Near-by are laid out a few tins of American cutlets, and the dog is squatting watchfully beside him.

The flickering of the fire throws copper gleams through his red hair. Mists are gathering from the meadows. The stars twinkle. We sit down beside him and fish our potatoes from the fire. The skins are burned black, but the inside is golden yellow and fragrant. We grasp the cutlets in both hands and saw away at them as if they were mouth organs. And we wash them down with schnapps out of our aluminum cups.

Potatoes! how good they taste!—But where are we exactly? Has the earth returned on her tracks? Are we children again sitting in the field near Torloxten? Haven't we been digging potatoes all day in the strong smelling earth, and behind us with baskets red-cheeked girls in faded blue dresses? And now the potato-fire! White mists trailing over the field, the fire crackling and the rest all still. The potatoes, they were the last fruit. Now all is gathered in—now only the earth, the clean air, the loved, bitter, white smoke, the end of the harvest. Bitter smoke, bitter smell of the harvest, potato-fire of our childhood— Wraiths of mist drift up, draw together and withdraw— faces of comrades—we are marching, the war is ended—all is melting, dissolving away—potato-fires have come to their own again, and the harvest and life.

"Ah, Willy! Willy, my boy!"

"This is the stuff, eh?" says he, looking up, his hands full of meat and potatoes.

Ach, fathead, I was meaning something far different.

The fire has burned out. Willy wipes his hands on his breeches and shuts his knife with a snap. A few dogs are barking in the village—otherwise all is quiet—No more shells. No clatter of munition columns. No more the wary scrunching of ambulance cars. A night in which far fewer men will die than ever during the last four years.

We go back into the inn. But there is not much doing now. Valentin has taken off his tunic and stands up on his hands a few times. The girls applaud, but Valentin is dis
satisfied. "I was a good artist once, Ferdinand. But that 
won't do, not even for the village fairs," he says gloomily 
to Kosole. "Gone stiff in the joints, I have—Valentin's fa
mous turn on the horizontal bar—that was a sight for sore 
eyes, I can tell you. And now I've got rheumatics"

"Ach, you be thankful you've got any bones left at all," says Kosole, and crashes his hand down on the table: "Music! Willy!"

Homeyer sets to work with a will on kettle-drum and rattles. Things begin to be lively again. I ask Jupp how he got along with Fatty. But he dismisses her with a most scornful gesture. "Come, come," I say in surprise, "that's pretty sudden, isn't it?"

He makes a grimace. "Yes, I thought she was gone on me, don't you know? And the fat bitch, she wanted money from me after! It was the shock made me bump my knee against that blasted garden-table. I can hardly walk now."

Ludwig Breyer is seated at the table, pale and still. He ought to have been asleep long ago, but he does not want to go. His arm is healing well, and the dysentery has improved slightly. But he remains turned in upon himself and troubled.

"Ludwig," says Tjaden in a thick voice, "you should go
out into the garden for a bit, too—that heals all 
diseases "

Ludwig shakes his head and turns suddenly very pale. I sit down beside him. "Aren't you glad to be going home?" I ask him.

He gets up and goes away. I cannot make him out. Later I discover him outside standing alone. I question him no more. We go inside again in silence.

In the doorway we bump into Ledderhose just making off with Fatty. Jupp grins in gleeful malice. "There's a surprise in store for him."

"For her," corrects Willy. "Or do you think Arthur may offer her a ha'penny, perhaps?"

Wine is running over the table, the lamp is smoking, and the girls' skirts are flying. A warm damp weariness drifts lightly at the back of my brow; everything has soft, blurred edges, like star shells seen through fog; my head sinks slowly down upon the table—Then the night roars on, smoothly and wonderful, like an express train, across the country—Soon we are at home.

For the last time we stand drawn up on the barracks square. Part of the company lives here in the neighbourhood and they are being disbanded. The rest of us must make our own way, for the railway services are so irregular that we cannot be transported farther in a body. Now we must separate.

The wide, grey square is much too big for us. Across it sweeps a bleak November wind smelling of decay and death. We are lined up between the canteen and the guard-room, more space we do not require. The wide, empty square about us wakes woeful memories. There, rank on rank, invisible, stand the dead.

Heel passes down the company. And behind him soundlessly walks the ghostly train of his predecessors. Nearest to him, still bleeding from the neck, his chin torn away, with sorrowful eyes, goes Bertinck, company commander for a year and a half, a teacher, married, four children;—beside him with black-green face, Müller, nineteen years of age, gas-poisoned three days after he took command of the company;—and next, Redecker, forestry-surveyor, two weeks later bashed into the earth by a direct hit;—then still paler, more remote, Büttner, captain, killed in a raid with a machine-gun bullet through the heart;—and like shadows behind them, already almost without name, so far back, the others—seven company commanders in two years. And more than five hundred men—Thirty-two are now standing in the barracks square.

Heel tries to say a few words in farewell. But nothing will come; he has to give up. No words in the world can take the field against this lonely, empty barracks square, and these sorry ranks of the survivors, standing there in their greatcoats and their boots, dumb and freezing, remembering their comrades.

Heel passes from one to another and shakes hands with
each man. When he comes to Max Weil, with thin lips he
says: "Now your time begins, Weil"

"It will be less bloody," answers Weil quietly.

"And less heroic," Heel retorts.

"That's not the only thing in life," says Weil.

"But the best," Heel replies. "What else is there?"

Weil pauses a moment. Then he says: "Things that sound feeble today, Herr Lieutenant—kindliness and love. These also have their heroisms."

"No," answers Heel swiftly, as though he had already long thought upon it, and his brow is clouded. "They offer only martyrdom. That is quite another thing. Heroism begins where reason leaves off: when life is set at a discount. It has to do with folly, with exaltation, with risk—and you know it. But little or nothing with purpose. Purpose, that is your word. 'Why? wherefore? to what end?'—who asks these questions, knows nothing of it."

He speaks emphatically, as if he would convince himself. His worn face works. Within these few days he has become embittered, and he looks years older. And Weil also, he has altered as rapidly. He used to be an unobtrusive sort of fellow—but then nobody could quite make him out—Now he has come suddenly to the fore and every minute grows more decided, more assured. No one ever thought he could talk like this. And the more agitated Heel becomes, the calmer is Max. Quietly and firmly he says: "The misery of millions is too big a price to pay for the heroics of a few."

Heel shrugs his shoulders. "Price—purpose—pay—those are your words. We shall see how far they will bring you!"

Weil glances at the private's uniform that Heel is still wearing. "And how far have yours brought you?"

Heel turns crimson. "To a memory," he says harshly. "To a remembrance of things which at any rate are not to be had for money."

Weil is silent a moment. "To a memory," he repeats, then turns and looks out over the empty square, and along our scanty ranks—"Yes,—and to a terrible responsibility." As for us, we do not make much of all this. We are freezing, and we consider it unnecessary to talk. Talking will not make the world any different.

The ranks break. The farewells begin. Müller, the man
next to me, settles the pack on his shoulders, clamps his
bundle of rations under his arm; then he stretches his hand
to me: "Well, good luck, Ernst—"

"Good luck, Felix " He passes on to Willy, to Albert, to Kosole.

Now comes Gerhard Pohl, the company singer who on the march used to sing all the top tenor notes, pursuing the melody as occasion offered, up into the clouds. The remainder of the time he would rest on his oars, so as to be able to put his full weight into the two-part passages. His tanned face with the wart has a troubled look: he has just parted from Karl Bröger with whom he has played so many games of skat. That has been hard for him.

"Good-bye, Ernst—"

"Good-bye, Gerhard." He is gone.

Weddekamp gives me his hand. He used to make the crosses for the fellows who were killed. "It's a pity, Ernst," says he, "I suppose I'll never be able to fit you up now. And you might have had a mahogany one, too! I was saving a lovely bit of piano-lid for you."

"Given time all things must happen," I reply, grinning. "I'll drop you a line when it comes to that."

He laughs. "That's right, keep smiling, lad; the war's not over yet."

Then with drooping shoulders he trots away.

The first group has already vanished through the barracks gate, Scheffler, Fassbender, young Lucke, and August Beckman among them. Others follow. We begin to be troubled. It is difficult at first to get used to the idea of so many fellows going away for good. Heretofore it was only death, or wounds, or temporary transfers that depleted the company. Now peace must be reckoned with.

We are so accustomed to shell-holes and trenches that we are suddenly suspicious of this still, green landscape; as though its stillness were but a pretence to lure us into some secretly undermined region.

And now there go our comrades, hastening out into it, heedless, alone, without rifles, without bombs! One would like to run after them, fetch them back, shout to them: "Hey! where are you off to? What are you after out there alone? You belong here with us. We must stick together. How else can we live?"