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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
There she stands before me, an old woman with an anxious, care-worn face. Her hands are clasped – weary, toil-worn hands with a soft, wrinkled skin, where the veins stand out bluish; hands become so for my sake. – I never thought of that before. But now I understand how it is that to this withered, little woman I am something different from any other soldier in the world: I am her child.
To her I have always remained so, even as a soldier. In the war she has only seen a pack of wild beasts threatening the life of her child. It has never occurred to her that this same threatened child has been just such another wild beast to the children of yet other mothers.
My gaze drops from her hands to my own. In May ’17 I stabbed a Frenchman with these hands. The blood ran nauseatingly hot over my fingers and in a panic of fear and of rage I stabbed again and again. And when the Frenchman, choking, clasped his hands to the wound, I could not stop myself, but I stabbed through his hands too, till he sagged down like an emptying tube. And afterwards I vomited and the whole day through I wept…
I turn my hands over slowly. In the big push at the beginning of July, I shot three men with these hands. They remained the whole day long hanging on the barbed wire. Their limp arms would fling upward with the blast of the shell explosions as if they still threatened us, and sometimes, too, as if imploring us for help. One of them had snow-white hair and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. – And again, later, I once threw a bomb at twenty yards that tore the legs off an English captain. He screamed terribly. He threw back his head, his mouth wide open, and, propping himself on his rigid arms, his trunk reared like a seal; then rapidly he bled to death.
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Day after day the rumble of the drum-fire of the Big Offensive had come rolling back to us off the western horizon; day after day we had seen the spent regiments returning, and if we asked any man what it was like. he would merely respond with a gesture and continue to stare straight ahead; day after day truckloads of wounded had been streaming past; and day after day, to-day for to-morrow, we had been digging long ditches for graves.
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Ludwig stands up. His brow is flaming, his eyes blaze. He looks Rahe in the face. “And why is it, Georg? Why is it? Because we were duped, I tell you, duped as even yet we hardly realize; because we were misused, hideously misused. They told us it was for the Fatherland, and meant the schemes of annexation of a greedy industry. – They told us it was for Honour, and meant the quarrels and the will to power of a handful of ambitious diplomats and princes. – They told us it was for the Nation, and meant the need for activity on the part of out-of-work generals!” He takes Rahe by the shoulders and shakes him. “Can’t see you see? They stuffed out the word Patriotism with all the twaddle of their fine phrases, with their desire for glory, their will to power, their false romanticism, their stupidity, their greed of business, and then paraded it before us as a shining ideal! And we thought they were sounding a bugle summoning us to a new, a more strenuous, a larger life. Can’t you see, man? But we were making war against ourselves without knowing it! Every shot that struck home, struck one of us! Can’t you see? Then listen and I will bawl it into your ears. The youth of the world rose up in every land, believing that it was fighting for freedom! And in every land they were duped and misused; in every land they have been shot down, they have exterminated each other! Don’t you see it now? – There is only one fight, the fight against the lie, the half-truth, compromise, against the old order. But we let ourselves be taken in by their phrases; and instead of fighting against them, we fought for them. We thought it was for the Future. It was against the Future. Our future is dead; for the youth is dead that carried it. We are merely the survivors, the ruins. But the other is alive still – the fat, the full, the well content, that lives on, fatter and fuller, more contented than ever! And why? Because the dissatisfied, the eager, the storm troops have died for it. But think of it! A generation annihilated! A generation of hope, of faith, of will, strength, ability. so hypnotized that they have shot down one another, though over the whole world they all had the same purpose!”
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