The Road Back

  There is a sudden, booming laughter. The Principal stops short in pained perplexity. The laughter comes from Willy standing there, big and gaunt, like an immense wardrobe. His face is red as a turkey's, he is so furious.

  "Green grasses!—green grasses!" he stutters, "long sleep? In the mud of shell-holes they are lying, knocked rotten, ripped in pieces, gone down into the bog Green grasses! This is not a singing lesson!" His arms are whirling like a windmill in a gale. "Hero's death! And what sort of a thing do you suppose that was, I wonder?——Would you like to know how young Hoyer died? All day long he lay out in the wire screaming, and his guts hanging out of his belly like macaroni. Then a bit of shell took off his fingers and a couple of hours later another chunk off his leg; and still he lived; and with his other hand he would keep trying to pack back his intestines, and when night fell at last he was done. And when it was dark we went out to get him and he was full of holes as a nutmeg grater—Now, yoti go and tell his mother how he died—if you have so much courage."

  The Principal is pale. He is hesitating whether to enforce discipline or to humour us. But he arrives at neither the one nor the other.

  Mr. Principal," begins Albert Trosske, "we have notcome here that you should tell us we did our job well, though unfortunately, as you say, we were not victorious. Shit to that——"

  The Principal winces, and with him the whole college ofmasters. "I must request you, at least in your expressions " he begins indignantly.

  "Shit! I say; Shit! and again Shit!" reiterates Albert. "That has been our every third word for years; and it's high time that.you knew it. But you don't seem to realise how things stand. We are none of your brave scholars! we are none of your good schoolboys, we are soldiers!"

  "But, gentlemen," cries the Old Man almost imploringly,"there is a misunderstanding—a most painful misunderstanding——"

  But he does not finish. He is interrupted by Helmuth Reinersmann, who carried his brother back through a jombardment on the Yser, only to put him down dead at the dressing-station.

  "Killed," he says savagely, "they were not killed for you to make speeches about them. They were our comrades. Enough! Let's have no more wind-bagging about it."

  The place is in wild confusion. The Principal stands there horrified and utterly helpless. The college of masters looks like a lot of scandalised old hens. Only two of the teachers are calm and they have been soldiers.

  The Old Man decides to humour us at all costs. We are too many, and Willy stands there too formidably trumpeting before him. And who can say what these undisciplined fellows may not be doing next; they may even produce bombs from their pockets. He beats the air with his arms as an archangel his wings. But no one listens to him.

  Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. There is silence. "Mr. Principal," says Ludwig in a clear voice. "You have seen the war after your fashion—with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. We do not mean to blame you. We, too, thought as you did. But we have seen the other side since then, and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. Yet we went through with it—we went through with it because here was something deeper that held us together, something that only showed up out there, a responsibility perhaps, but at any rate something of which you know nothing, and about which there can be no speeches."

  Ludwig pauses a moment, gazing vacantly ahead. He passes his hand over his forehead and continues. "We have not come to ask a reckoning—that would be foolish; nobody knew then what was coming—But we do require that you shall not again try to prescribe what we shall think of these things. We went out full of enthusiasm, the name of the 'Fatherland' on our lips—and we have returned in silence, but with the thing, the Fatherland, in our hearts. And now we ask you to be silent too. Have done with fine phrases. They are not fitting. Nor are they fitting to our dead comrades. We saw them die. And the memory of it is, still too near that we can abide to hear them talked of as you are talking. They died for more than that."

  Now everywhere it is quiet. The Principal has his handselapsed together. "But, Breyer," he says gently, "I—I did not mean it so——"

  Ludwig has done.

  After a while the Principal continues: "But tell me then, what is it that you do want?"

  We look at one another. What do we want? Yes, if it were so easy a thing to say in a sentence. A vague, urgent sense of it we have—but for words? We have no words for it, yet. But perhaps later we shall have.

  After a moment's silence Westerholt pushes his way to the front and plants himself in front of the Principal. "Let's hear something practical," says he, "that's what we're here for now. Here we are, seventy soldiers, and we have to go back to school again. What do you propose to do with us? And I may as well tell you at once—we know as good as nothing now of all your bookish stuff, and what's more we've no wish to stay here longer than need be."

  The Principal checks his displeasure. He explains that as yet he has had no instructions in the matter from the authorities. For the present we must go back to the several classes from which we went out. Then later, of course, we shall see what arrangements can be made.

  This is received with mutterings and laughter.

  "Don't you run away with any idea," says Willy indignantly, "that we're going to perch on forms along with kids who never saw the war, and put up our hands nicely whenever we know anything.—We're staying together."

  We are beginning to see now how funny it all is. For years they have let us shoot, and stab, and kill; and now it is a matter of grave importance whether it was from the Second Form or from the Third Form that we went off to do it In this one they do equations with two unknowns, and in the other with only one. These are the differences that matter here.

  The Principal promises to ask that a special course be granted for soldiers.

  "We can't wait for that," says Albert Trosske curtly. "We had better see about it ourselves."

  The Principal does not reply; he walks to the door in silence.

  The masters follow, and we traipse out after them. But Willy, for whom it has all gone much too smoothly, firsttakes the two pot plants from the lecture desk and smashesthem on to the floor. "I never could stomach vegetables anyway," he says viciously. The laurel wreath he plants askewon Westerholt's head. "Make yourself soup out of it——"

  The smoke of cigars and pipes fills the room. We are sitting in council with the Returned Men of the Grammar School—more than a hundred soldiers, eighteen lieutenants, thirty warrant-officers and non-coms.

  Westerholt has brought a copy of the old School Regulations and is reading aloud from it. Progress is slow, for almost every paragraph is received with roars of laughter. We can hardly believe that such rules once applied to us.

  Westerholt is particularly amused to discover that before the war we were not allowed to be on the streets after nine o'clock at night without permission of a form-master. But Willy deals with him. "Don't you be too fresh, Alwin," he shouts across at him. "You've flouted your form-master worse than any of us—what with saying you were killed, and getting yourself a funeral oration off the Principal, and him saying you were a hero and a model scholar! and then after that you have the damned cheek to come back alive! Nice predicament you've landed the Old Man in! Now he'll have to take back all the credit he gave to your corpse—for if I know anything, you're just as rotten at algebra and composition as ever you were."

  We elect a Students' Council; for, though our schoolmasters may do, perhaps, to pump a few facts into us for examination purposes, we are certainly not going to let them govern us any more—For ourselves we appoint as representatives, Ludwig Breyer, Helmuth Reinersmann and Albert Trosske; for the Grammar School, Georg Rahe and Karl Bröger.

  Then we settle on three delegates to start next morning for the Provincial Authorities and the Ministry, to set out our demands regarding the syllabus and the examination. For this purpose
we choose Willy, Westerholt and Albert. Ludwig cannot go, as he is still not well enough. The three are then duly equipped with passes and free railway vouchers, of which we have whole blocks in hand. And we have, of course, plenty of Lieutenants and Soldiers' Councillors to countersign them.

  Helmuth Reinersmann looks to it that the delegation shall have the appropriate outward appearance also. He requires Willy to leave at home the new outfit that he pinched from the quartermaster, and to put on for the journey a soiled and tattered one instead.

  "But why?" asks Willy, disappointed.

  "That will tell with the pen-pushers more than a hundred good reasons," explains Helmuth.

  Willy protests, for he is very proud of his tunic, and thought to make rather a hit with it in the cafés of the capital. "If I thump good and hard on the inspector's table, won't that do just as well?" he suggests.

  But Helmuth is not to be dissuaded. "It's no good, Willy," says he. "We can't knock them all on the head. We have need of these people for once. But if you thump on the table in a ragged tunic, then, I say, you'll get more out of them for us than you would in your new one—That is the sense of the meeting, I take it?"

  Willy gives way, and Helmuth now turns his attention to Alwin Westerholt. He seems to him rather too naked, so Ludwig Breyer's decoration is pinned on his chest. "Your arguments will sound much more convincing to an Under Secretary that way," adds Helmuth.

  In Albert's case this is not necessary; he has enough to hang out on his own account. At length the three are satisfactorily furnished, and Helmuth surveys his handiwork. "Superb!" says he. "Now for it! And for once show the bloody turnip-eaters what a real front-line man-eater looks like."

  "Make your mind easy on that score," says Willy, now quite himself again.

  The smoke of pipes and cigars fills the room. Desires, thoughts, ambitions in seething confusion. God only knows what will come of them. A hundred young soldiers, eighteen lieutenants, thirty warrant-officers and non-coms., all sitting here, wanting to start to live. Any man of them could take a company under fire across No Man's Land with hardly a casualty. There is not one who would hesitate for an instant to do the right thing when the cry: "They are coming!" was yelled down into his dugout. Every man has been tempered through countless, pitiless days; every man a complete soldier, no more and no less.

  But for peace? Are we suitable? Are we fit now for anything but soldiering?

  PART III

  1.

  I am on my way from the station to visit Adolf Bethke. I know this house at once—he has described it to me so often out there.

  A garden with fruit trees. The apples have not all been picked yet. There are a lot lying in the grass under the trees. On an open space before the door is an immense chestnut tree and the ground beneath it is covered over and over with russet leaves, the stone table below and the bench also. The pinkish white of the burst, spikey husks, the lustrous brown of the fallen nuts gleams among the leaves. I take up one or two and look at the lacquered, veined, mahogany rind and the lighter coloured, germinal spot underneath. To think such things exist! I look about me—To think that there is still all this—these gay trees! blue, misty woods—yes, woods, not mere shattered tree-stumps; and this wind over the fields, without fume of powder or stink of gas; this greasy, glistening, ploughed earth with its pungent smell; horses pulling ploughs, not gun-limbers now; and following behind them, without rifles, the ploughmen, home again, ploughmen in soldiers' uniforms.

  The sun is hidden by clouds floating above a little copse, but pencils of silver light shoot out from behind them. Children's gaily coloured kites swaying high up in the air. Lungs breathing deeply, the cool air streaming in and out—no guns, no trench-mortars now; no pack cramping the chest, no belt hanging heavy at the belly; gone from the neck the taut sense of wariness and watching, gone too the half-slinking gait that may be changed within the second to falling and lingering and horror and death. I walk free and upright with swinging shoulders and feel the strength and the richness of this moment—to be here, to be visiting Adolf, my comrade!

  The door of the house stands half open. On the right is the kitchen. I knock. No one answers. "Good day!" I call. Nothing stirs. I go in farther and open yet another door. Somebody is seated alone at the table—now he looks up, dishevelled, an old uniform, a glance: Bethke!

  "Adolf!" I exclaim, happily, "didn't you hear me? Asleep, were you, eh?"

  Without shifting his position he gives me his hand.

  "Thought I'd come over and see you, Adolf."

  "That's good of you, Ernst," he says gloomily.

  "Something the matter, Adolf?" I ask in surprise.

  "Ach, don't ask, Ernst——"

  I sit down beside him. "But, Adolf, old man, what's the matter with you?"

  He parries. "Nothing, I'm all right; leave us alone, Ernst,can't you?—It's good, though—it's good one of you hascome at last." He stands up. "It makes a man crazy, being alone here like this——"

  I look around. There is no sign of his wife anywhere.

  He remains silent a while, then suddenly says once again: "It's good you have come." He hunts about for some schnapps and some cigarettes. We have a spot out of two thick glasses with a pink inset underneath. Before the window lies the garden and the path with the fruit trees. There is a gust of wind and the garden gate rattles. Out of the corner a dark, weighted grandfather-clock sounds the hour.

  "Good health, Adolf!" "Good health, Ernst!"

  A cat steals across the room. It jumps up on the sewing-machine and begins to purr. After a while Adolf begins to talk. "They come here and talk, my people and her people—and they don't understand me, and I don't understand them. It's as if we weren't the same persons any more." He props his head in his hands. "You understand me, Ernst, and I you—but with these people, it's as if there were a stone wall between us."

  Then at last I hear the whole story.

  With his pack on his back and a whole sack full ofgood things, coffee, chocolate, and a length of silk even, enough to make a whole dress, Bethke came home.

  He meant to come softly and give his wife a surprise, I but the dog starts barking like mad, almost upsetting his kennel. Then Bethke can restrain himself no longer. He runs down the path between the apple trees—his path, his trees, his house, his wife! His heart is thudding in his throat like a sledge-hammer. He flings open the door, a great sigh, and then in—"Marie——"

  Now he sees her. With his very glance he embraces her. It overwhelms him with joy—home, the dim light, the clock ticking, the table, the big armchair, and there, his wife!—he makes toward her. But she retreats before him, staring at him as if he were a ghost.

  He suspects nothing. "Did I frighten you?" he asks, laughing.

  "Yes," she says nervously.

  "That will soon pass, Marie," he answers, trembling in his excitement—Now at last that he is here again in the room, his whole being is trembling. He has been away from it so long, too long!

  "I didn't know you were coming so soon, Adolf," says his wife! She is standing with her back to the cupboard and gazing at him with great wide eyes. For an instant something cold suddenly grips him, it takes his breath away. "Aren't you even a little bit glad, then?" he asks awkwardly.

  "Yes, Adolf, of course——"

  "Has something happened?" he goes on, still holding all his traps in his hand.

  Then the trouble begins. She puts her head down on the table and starts to blub.—He might as well know it at once—the others would only tell him, anyway.—She had an affair with a man! It just came over her; she didn't mean any harm; she had never thought of anyone but him.—Now let him kill her if he will.

  Adolph stands there and stands. At last he notices that he still has his sack perched like a monkey on his shoulder. He looses it and starts to unpack; he is trembling; he keeps thinking to himself: "It can't be true, though, it can't be."—He goes on unpacking merely to do something, not to have to be still. The silk crackles in
his hand, he holds it out: "I wanted to bring this for you," he says, and is still thinking: "It can't be, it can't be true."—Helplessly he holds out the red silk, and still nothing of what has happened sinks into his skull.

  But she is weeping and will hear nothing. He sits down to think, and suddenly is conscious of a terrible hunger. On the table are some apples from the trees in the garden, good russets they are; he takes them and eats, he must do something. Then his hands become limp, and he has understood it. A raging fury rises in him. He must murder someone.—He runs out in search of the man.

  But he does not find him. Then he goes to the ale house. There the men greet him, but there is an air of constraint; they talk warily, looking past him, choosing their words. So they know it.—Bethke behaves as if nothing were wrong—but no man could keep that up—He drinks off his pint and goes, just as somebody asks: "Been home yet?" And when he has left the bar-room there is silence behind him. He ranges hither and thither until it is late, and at last is standing again before his own house. What should he do? He goes in. The lamp is burning; there is coffee on the table, and fried potatoes in a pan on the hearth. "Ah, but how good, if only the other weren't true!" he thinks miserably. "Even a white, cloth on the table! But now it only makes it the harder."