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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
For the last time we stand drawn up in 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 guardroom; more space we do not require. 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, Möller, 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 the shadows behind them, already almost without a 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.
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“The misery of millions is too big a price to pay for the heroics of a few.”
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“We do want a lot more! We want an end of war, an end of all this hatred! An end of murder! That’s what we’re after. We want to be men again, not war machines!”
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The dim, uncertain light in the drying yard flickers – then suddenly, like a shadow, remote, another scene rises up away beyond it: fluttering linen, a solitary mouth organ in the evening, a march in the dusk – and scores of dead Negroes in faded blue greatcoats, with burst lips and bloody eyes – gas. The scene stands out for a moment, then it wavers and vanishes.
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The rest of us gathered the corpses that lay about in the area ahead of us and put them side by side in a long row till the grave should be ready…A few of the dead had already black, putrefied faces – putrefaction was rapid during the wet months. On the other hand they did not stink quite so badly as in summer. Some of them were soaked and sodden with water like sponges. One we found lying flat, spread-eagled on the ground. Only when we took him up did we see that there was practically nothing left of him but the rags of his uniform, he was so pulped…Such stray arms, legs or heads as we found we set apart on a waterproof sheet by themselves…
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The sergeant major stood there and peered down into the pallid face below, upon which the inconceivable expression of horror was frozen to a stillness that almost screamed.
“Better say the prayer now and get back,” said Albert coldly.
The sergeant major wiped his forehead. “I can’t,” he murmured. The horror had caught him. – We all had that experience: for weeks together a man might feel nothing. Then suddenly there would come some new, unforeseen thing and it would break him down. – With green face he stumbled off to the dugout.
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