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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war
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Erich Maria Remarque
From The Road Back (1930)
Translated by A.W. Wheen
A shell lands not twenty yards from us. As the beast comes on screaming, we open wide our mouths to save our eardrums; even so we are half deafened, and our eyes filled with dirt and muck and in our noses the foul stench of powder and sulphur. It rains metal. Somebody has stopped one, for along with a smoking shell-fragment there lands in our crater by Bethke’s head a severed hand.
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There are many indeed who lie there, though until just now we have not thought of it so. Hitherto we just all remained there together, they in the graves, we in the trenches, divided only by a few handfuls of earth. They were but a little before us; daily we became less and they more, and often we have not known whether we already belonged to them or not. And sometimes too the shells would bring them back among us again, crumbling bones tossed up; scraps of uniform; wet, decayed heads, already earthy, to the noise of the drumfire issuing once more from their buried dugouts and returning to the battle. It did not seem to us terrible; we were too near to them. But now we are going back into life and they must stay there.
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A gas hospital. Bad cases that cannot be moved. Blue faces, waxen green faces, dead eyes, eaten by the acid; wheezing, choking, dying men. They want to get away; they are afraid of being taken prisoner. – As if it were not a matter of indifference where they die…
The cries are terrible. The pallid faces seem so unreal in the light out here in the open. But most awful are the beards. They take on a life of their own; they stand out stiff, fantastical, growing, luxuriating over the sunken jaws, a black fungus that feeds and thrives the more these sag and waste away.
Some of the badly wounded reach out their thin, grey arms like children. “Take me with you, mate,” they say, imploring, “Take me with you mate.” In the hollows of their eyes lurk already deep, strange shadows from which the pupils struggle with difficulty like drowning things. Others are quiet, following us as far as they can with their eyes.
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As I march on with pack and lowered head, by the side of the road I see an image of bright, silken trees reflected in the pools of rain. In these occasional mirrors they are displayed clearer than in reality. They get another light and in another way. Embedded there in the brown earth lies a span of sky, trees, depths and clearness. Suddenly I shiver. For the first time in many years I feel again that something is still beautiful, that this in all its simplicity is beautiful and pure, this image in the water pool before me – and in this thrill my heart leaps up. For a moment all that other falls away, and now, for the first time, I feel it; I see it; I comprehend it fully: Peace. The weight that nothing eased before, now lifts at last. Something strange, something new flies up, a dove, a white dove. – Trembling horizon, tremulous expectancy, first glimpse, presentiment, hope, exaltation, imminence: Peace.
Sudden panic, and I look around. There behind me on the stretchers my comrades are now lying and still they call. It is peace, yet they must die. But I, I am trembling with joy and am not ashamed. – And that is odd.
Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers – is that the reason why wars perpetually recur?
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