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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 very faint, hardly audible scratching comes across to me from beyond the brambles ahead. It is silent again. I wait on. A beetle with greenish-gold wings crawls up a camomile stalk in front of me. His feelers are groping over the jagged leaves. Again a light rustling in the noonday silence. The rim of a helmet shows over the bushes. A forehead, clear eyes, a firm mouth; searchingly the eyes move over the landscape and return again to a pad of white paper and some crayons. Quite unsuspecting of danger, the man is making a pastel of the farm yonder and the dark copper beeches in the quivering air.
I drag the hand grenade toward me. It takes a long time. With my left hand I pull the button and count under my breath; then send the bomb flying in a low curve to the blackberry bushes and slip back swiftly into my hollow. I press my body close down on the earth, bury my face in the grass and open my mouth.
The crash of the explosion tears the air, splinters twanging – a cry goes up, long-drawn, frantic with horror. I hold the second bomb in my hand and peer out from my cover. The Englishman is lying clear in the open field; his two legs are blown off at the knees, the blood is pouring out; the bands of his puttees, far unrolled, trail out behind him like loose ribbons; he is lying on his belly; with his arms he paddles the grass; his mouth is wide open, shrieking.
He heaves himself around and sees me. Then he props himself on his arms and rears his trunk like a seal; he shrieks at me and bleeds, bleeds. – The red face grows pale and sinks in, the gaze snaps, and eyes and mouth are at last no more than black caverns in a swiftly decaying countenance, that slowly inclines to the earth, sags and sinks into the dandelions. Finished!
I worm myself off and begin to work my way back to our trenches. But I look around once more. The dead man has suddenly come to life again! He straightens up as though he meant to run after me! I pull the string of the second hand grenade and hurl it toward him. It falls a yard short, rolls,and lies still. I count – count – why doesn’t it explode? The dead man is standing upright; he is showing his teeth! I throw the next hand grenade – it misses fire also. He has made a few steps already – he is running on his stumps, grinning, his arms stretched out toward me. I hurl my last hand grenade. It goes flying to his chest; he wards it off. – I jump up to run, but my knees refuse to work; they are soft as butter. Endlessly, painfully, I drag them forward; I stick fast to the ground; I wrench, I hurl myself forward. Already I hear the panting of my pursuer. – I drag my failing legs with my hands. But from behind two hands close around my neck, they bear me backwards, to the ground. The dead man is kneeling on my chest; he hauls in the puttees trailing out behind him over the grass; he twists them around my neck. I bend my head away, I brace all my muscles, I fling myself to the right to escape the noose. – Ah! A jerk, a strangling pain in the throat. The dead man is dragging me toward the precipitous edge of the chalk pit. He is rolling me down into it. I lose balance, struggle to catch hold – I am slipping, I fall, cry out, fall endlessly, cry, hit something, cry -
Darkness comes away in great clots under my clutching hands. With a crash, something falls down beside me. I strike upon stones, on sharp corners, iron; I shriek uncontrollably, swift wild yelling I cannot stop. Shoutings, clutchings at my arms. – I beat them off; something trips over me. I snatch a rifle, grope for cover; I wrench the weapon to my shoulder, pull the trigger, still yelling…I wrench free, I run. A blow on my knee and I fall into a soft hollow, into light, shrill, stabbing light…Now nothing but my own cry like a spear in space. – Suddenly it breaks.
The farmer and his wife are there before me. I am lying half on the bed and half on the floor. The farmer beside me is picking himself up. I am desperately clutching a walking stick in my hand as if it were a rifle. I must be bleeding somewhere; then I see it is only the dog licking my hand.
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In the pale light of the open door stands a shadow. It sways and hovers; it comes nearer and beckons, – a figure, a face with dark eye sockets, between them a great cleft gaping, a mouth speaking without sound. Is that – ?
“Walter – ” I whisper. Walter Willenbrock, killed in August ’17, at Passchendaele. Am I mad then? Am I dreaming? Am I ill? – But behind him another is already pushing his way in, – pale, crippled, bowed down; Friedrich Tomberge, whose back was broken by a shell splinter at Soissons. while he was sitting on the stairs of a dugout.
And now they press in, with dead eyes, grey and ghastly, a swarm of shadows; they have come back again and are filling the room; Franz Kemmerich, with his eighteen summers, who had his leg amputated and died three days after. – Stanislaus Katczinsky, with dragging feet and drooping head, whence trickles a thin, dark stream. – Gerhard Feldkamp, blown to pieces by a trench-mortar bomb at Ypres. Paul Bäumer, killed in October ’18; Heinrich Wessling, Anton Heinzmann, Haie Westhus, Otto Matthes, Franz Wagner, – shadows, shadows. A long procession, an unending line, they press in, they perch on the books, they clamber up to the window, they fill the room.
But suddenly the horror, the astonishment breaks in me; for slowly a stronger, a darker shadow has arisen. Propped on its arms, it creeps through the door; it takes on life, bones grow within it, a body drags itself in, teeth gleam chalky-white out of the black face, eyes now flash in the deep sockets. Rearing like a seal, he crawls in, toward me – the English captain! And trailing behind him, rustling, the puttees. With a slight lurch he flings himself upwards, reaches toward me with clutching hands…
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