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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms
Erich Maria Remarque: With the melting came the dead
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Erich Maria Remarque
From A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley
For the first time in months Graeber was sitting in a really warm room. At the front there had sometimes been ovens, but then it was always just the side you turned to the heat that was warm. The other was icy. Here the whole room was warm. One’s bones could finally thaw out. One’s bones and one’s skull. It was the skull that had been frost-bound the longest.
They sat around and looked for lice and cracked them. Graeber had no head lice. Blanket lice and clothing lice did not invade the head, that was an old rule. Lice respected one another’s territory. They had no wars.
***
The man with the crushed legs came first. A beam had shattered them and pinned him down. The man was still live. He was not unconscious. Graeber stared into his face. He did not know him. They sawed through the beam and pulled up a stretcher. The man did not scream. He just turned up his eyes and they were suddenly white.
They widened the entrance and found two bodies. Both were crushed flat. The faces were flat; nothing stood out any longer, the noses were gone and the teeth were two rows of flat kernel, somewhat scattered and askew, like almonds baked in a cake. Graeber bent over them. He saw dark hair. His people were blond. They hauled the bodies out and they lay, strange and flat, on the street.
It grew lighter. The moon was rising. The sky became a soft, very cool, almost colorless blue. “When was the raid?” Graeber asked when he was relieved.
“Yesterday night.”
***
He crouched down beside the stairs. Jacob’s ladder, he thought. What had that been? Wasn’t it a stair that led to Heaven? And didn’t angels climb up and down on it? Where were the angels now? Transformed into airplanes. Where was everything? Where was the earth? Was it only for graves? I have dug graves, he thought, many graves. What am I doing here? Why doesn’t anyone help me? I have seen thousands of ruins. But I had never really seen one. This one is the first. This one is different from all the others. Why am I not lying under it? I ought to be lying under it.
***
He stared at the gnawed roofs of the houses. Just what had he expected? An island behind the fronts? Home, security, refuge, comfort? Perhaps.But the islands of home had long since silently sunk under the monotony of pointless death, the fronts were shattered and the war was everywhere. Everywhere, even in the brain and the heart.
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