Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms
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Erich Maria Remarque
From A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley

Death smelled different in Russia than in Africa. In Africa, under heavy English fire, the corpses between the lines had often lain unburied for a long time, too; but the sun had worked fast. At first the smell had come over with the wind, sweet, stifling and heavy – gas had filled the dead and they had risen like ghosts in the light of the alien stars as though they were fighting one last battle, silent, hopeless, and each for himself alone – but by the next day they had already begun to shrink, to nestle against the earth with infinite weariness as if trying to crawl into it – and if later they could be brought back some were light and dried out and the ones that were found weeks after were hardly more than skeletons that rattled loosely in uniforms suddenly far too big for them. It was a dry death, in sand, sun, and wind. In Russia it was a greasy, stinking death.
It had been raining for days. The snow was melting. A month earlier it had been three yards deeper. The ruined village, which at first had seemed to be nothing but charred roofs, had silently, night by night, risen higher out of the sinking snow. Window frames had crept into sight; a few nights later the archways of doors; then stairways that led down into the dirty whiteness. The snow melted and melted, and with the melting came the dead.
They were old dead. The village had been fought over several times – in November, in December, in January, and now in April. It had been taken and lost and taken again. The snowstorms had come and covered the corpses, sometimes within hours, so deep that the medical corpsmen often could not find them – until finally almost every day had thrown a new layer of white over the devastation, like a nurse stretching a sheet over a bloody, filthy bed.
First came the January dead. They lay highest and came out at the beginning of April, shortly after the snow began to slip. Their bodies were frozen stiff and their faces were gray wax.
They were buried like boards. On a little hill behind the village where the snow was not so deep it had been shoveled away and graves were hacked out of the frozen earth. It was heavy work. Only the Germans were buried. The Russians were thrown into an open paddock. They began to stink when the weather turned mild. When it got too bad snow was shoveled over them. It was not necessary to bury them; no one expected that the village would be held for any length of time. The regiment was in retreat. The advancing Russians could bury their dead themselves.
Beside the December dead were found the weapons that had belonged to the January dead. Rifles and hand grenades had sunk deeper than the bodies; sometimes steel helmets too. It was easier with these corpses to cut away the identification marks inside the uniforms; the melting snow had already softened the cloth. Water stood in their open mouths as though they had drowned. In some cases a limb or two had thawed out. When they were carried off, the bodies were still stiff, but an arm and a hand would dangle and sway as though the corpse were waving, hideously indifferent and almost obscene. With all of them, when they lay in the sun, the eyes thawed first. They lost their glassy brilliance and the pupils turned to jelly. The ice in them melted and ran slowly out of the eyes – as if they were weeping.

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