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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
It was over. The city stank of burning and death and was full of fires. There were red and green and yellow and white ones; some were nothing but crawling, serpent-like flickerings over the fallen ruins, and others glared steadily out of the roofs toward the sky; there were fires that wrapped themselves almost tenderly around the still-standing house-fronts, embracing them closely, shyly, cautiously; and others that shot violently out of windows. There were conflagrations and fiery walls and fiery towers, there were blazing dead and blazing wounded who burst shrieking out of the houses and spun around and tried to climb up the sides of walls and ran raving in circles until they collapsed and crept, mewing hoarsely, and then only jerked and croaked and stank of burned flesh.
“”The torches,” someone standing beside Graeber said.”You can’t rescue them. They burn up alive. The damnable stuff from incendiary bombs gets spattered on them and burns right through everything, skin, flesh, and bones.”
“Why can’t they put them out?”
“That would take a separate fire extinguisher for each one, and I don’t even know then whether it would help. That devilish stuff eats its way through everything. And the shrieking!”
“They ought to be shot quickly if they can’t be rescued.”
“Just try it and get hanged as a murderer! And just try to hit one while they’re racing around like mad! That’s what turn them into torches. The wind, you understand! They run and that makes the wind and the wind fans the fire and in an instant they’re all in flames.”
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Behind a stone wall he saw the dead. Like a slaughterhouse, he thought. No, not like a slaughterhouse; a slaughterhouse was more orderly; the animals were killed, bled, and drawn according to rules. Here they were mangled, crushed, mutilated, singed, and roasted. Scraps of clothing still hung on them; an arm of a woolen sweater, a dotted dress, one leg of a pair of brown corduroy trousers, a brassière in the wires of which hung bloody breasts. To one side lay a nest of dead children, every which way. They had been caught in a cellar that was not strong enough. Single hands, feet, trampled heads with little hair, twisted legs; in the midst of this a schoolbag, a basket with a dead cat, a very pale boy, white as an albino, dead without a wound, stretched out as though he had not yet lived and was waiting to be animated, and in front of him a corpse burned black, not only deeply but quite uniformly except for one foot that was only red and covered with blisters. It was no longer possible to tell whether it was a man or a woman; the sex and the breast had been burned away. A gold ring gleamed brightly on a black, shrunken finger.
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