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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 A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley
“Everything’s a necessary exception,” Graebe declared bitterly. “Everything that one does oneself, I mean. Of course, not what the others do. When we bomb a city that’s a strategic necessity; when the others do it it’s a hideous crime.”
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Shadows arose, bloodless and empty, they moved and looked at him and through him and when they fell they were like the gray, uptorn ground and the ground was like them, as though it were moving and growing into them. The high gleaming sky above him seemed for a moment to lose its color before the gray smoke of this endless dying, which seemed to rise up out of the earth and throw an overcast across the sun. Betrayed, he thought bitterly; they had been betrayed, betrayed and befouled, their fighting and their dying have been coupled with murder and injustice and lies and might; they have been defrauded, defrauded of everything, even of their miserable, courageous, pitiful and useless deaths.
***
A wardrobe with open doors sailed over him like a plump, prehistoric bird. A mighty current of air laid hold of him and whirled him about, flames shot out of the ground, a harsh yellow wiped out the sky, burned away to a more intense white and fell to earth like cloudburst. Graber inhaled flame. His lungs seemed on fire, he collapsed, pressed his head into his arms, held his breath until his head seemed to be bursting and looked up. Through the tears and the burning in his eyes a picture slowly formed itself and steadied: a torn, bespattered wall thrust backward over a staircase and on the stairs, impaled upon the splintered steps, the body of the five-year-old girl, her short plaid skirt thrown high, her leg sprawled and bare, her arms outstretched as though crucified, her breast pierced by a bar from an iron fence whose knob extended far beyond her back – and to one side, as though provided with many more joints than in life, the air raid warden, headless, slack and now spouting only a little blood, twisted into a knot with his legs over his shoulders, a dead contortionist. The infant was not to be seen. It must have been hurled somewhere in the gale which now returned hot and flaming, driving the fire before it in the backdraft. Graber heard someone beside him shouting: “Swine! Swine! Damned swine!” and stared at the sky and looked around him and realized that it was himself who was shouting.
…The heavy explosions had ceased.The anti-aircraft guns went on firing. Graeber ran diagonally back across the square. He did not run to the nearest cellar; he ducked into the fresh bomb crater at the end of the square. The smell in it almost choked him. He crept up to the edge and lay there staring at the factory. It was only a different war here, he thought. At the front each one had only to look out after himself. And if you happened to have a brother in the same company that was a lot; but here each one had a family and it was not he alone that was being shot at; all the rest were being shot at as well. It was a double and triple and ten-fold war. He thought of the body of the five-year-old girl and then of the numberless others he had seen and he thought of his parents, and of Elizabeth, and he felt a spasm of hatred against the ones who had caused all this; it was hatred that did not stop at the borders of his country and that had nothing to do with any understanding or with justice.
It began to rain. The drops fell like a silver shower of gentle years through the stinking, violated air. They splashed up as they struck and darkened the ground. Then came the next wave of bombers.
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