The Road Back Read Free Page B

side and look toward the Front. Light trailers of mist lie over the ground. The lines of shell-holes and trenches are clearly visible. They are, indeed, only the last line—they belong really to the reserve position—still they are well within range of the guns. How often we have gone in through those saps! How often and how few we have come back through them! Grey stretches the monotonous landscape before us—in the distance what is left of a copse, a few stumps, the ruins of a village, in the midst of it one solitary high wall that has withstood it all.
    "Yes," says Bethke meditatively, "it's four years, four years we've been sitting there—"
    "Yes, damn it all," nods Kosole. "And now it just fizzles out!"
    "Well—well——" Willy leans back against the parapet.
    "Funny, eh?"
    We stand and gaze. The farmhouse, the remnants of the wood, the heights, the trenches on the skyline yonder—it had been a terrible world, and life a burden. Now it is over, and will stay behind here; when we set out, it will drop behind us, step by step, and in an hour be gone as if it had never been. Who can realise it?
    There we stand, and should laugh and shout for joy— and yet we have now a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs, as one who swallows a throat-swab and would vomit.
    None knows what to say. Ludwig Breyer leans wearily against the side of the trench and raises his hand, as if there were some man yonder to whom he would wave.
    Heel appears. "Can't bear to leave it, eh?—Well, now for the dregs."
    Ledderhose looks at him in astonishment. "Now for peace, you mean."
    "Yes, that's it, the dregs," says Heel, and goes off, looking as if his mother had just died.
    "He hasn't got his ' Pour le métrite ,' that's what's biting him," explains Ledderhose.
    "Ach, shut your mug!" says Albert.
    "Well, let's go," urges Bethke, but still stands on.
    "A lot of us lying there," says Ludwig.
    "Yes—Brandt, Müller, Kat, Haie, Baümer, Ber tinck—"
    "Sandkuhl, Meinders, the two Terbrüggen, Hugo, Bern hard—"
    "For Christ's sake, stop, man "
    They are many indeed that lie there, though until now we have not thought of it so. Hitherto we have just all remained there together, they in the graves, we in the trenches, divided only by a few handfuls of earth. They were but a little before us; daily we became less and they more, and often we have not known whether we already belonged to them or not. And sometimes too the shells would bring them back among us again—crumbling bones tossed up, scraps of uniforms, wet, decayed hands, already earthy —to the noise of the drum-fire issuing once more from their buried dugouts and returning to the battle. It did not seem to us terrible; we were too near to them. But now we are going back into life and they must stay there.
    Ludwig, whose cousin was killed in this sector, blows his nose through his fingers and turns about. Slowly we follow. But we halt yet a few times and look about us. And again we stand still, and suddenly we know that all that yonder, that hell of terrors, that desolate corner of shell-hole-land, has usurped our hearts;—yes, damn it, that it should sound such slush!—it seems almost as if it had become endeared to us, a dreadful homeland, full of torment, and we simply belonged in it.
    We shake our heads—but whether it be the lost years that remain there, or the comrades who lie there, or all the misery that this earth covers—there is a grief in our bones, enough to make us howl aloud.
    And so we march out.

PART I
    1.

    R oads stretch far through the landscape, the villages he in a grey light; trees rustle, leaves are falling, falling.
    Along the road, step upon step, in their faded, dirty uniforms tramp the grey columns. The unshaved faces beneath the steel helmets are haggard, wasted with hunger and long peril, pinched and dwindled to the lines drawn by terror and courage and death. They trudge along in silence; silently, as they have now marched over so many roads, have