The Road Back (35 page)

He is a soldier, he belongs to us, and we pronounce him Not Guilty!" The Prosecutor has the floor at last. "Such monstrous disorder " he gasps, and shouts to the policeman to put Willy under arrest.

Renewed uproar. But Willy keeps them all at bay and I start in again. "Disorder is it? Then whose fault is that? Yours, I say! You, everyone of you, should stand before our tribunal! It is you with your war, who have made us what we are! Lock us away too, with him, that's the safest thing to do. What did you ever do for us when we came back? Nothing, I tell you! Nothing! You wrangled about 'Victory'! You unveiled war memorials! You spouted about heroism! and you denied your responsibility!

"You should have come to our help!—But no, you left us alone in that worst time of all, when we had to find a road back again. You should have proclaimed it from every pulpit; you should have told us so when we were demobilised; again and again you should have said to us: 'We have all grievously erred! We have all to find the road back again! Have courage! It will be hardest for you, you left nothing behind you that can lead you back again! Have patience!' You should have shown us again what life is! You should have taught us to live again! But no, you left us to stew in our juice! You left us to go to the dogs! You should have taught us to believe again in kindliness, in order, in culture, in love! But instead you started again to falsify, to lie, to stir up more hatred and to enforce your damned laws. One of us has gone under already! And there stands the second."

We are quite beside ourselves. All the anger, the bitterness, the disillusionment in us has seethed up and boiled over. There is wild disorder in the room. It continues a long time, but at last comparative quiet is restored. We all get one day's imprisonment for contempt of court and have to leave the place at once. Even now we might easily break away from the policeman and escape; but that is not what we want. We want to go into prison with Albert. We pass close by him to show him that we are all with him.

Later we learn that he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment and that he received sentence without a word.

One idea had become rooted in Georg Rahe's mind. He would see his past once again, eye to eye. He contrived to come by a foreigner's passport and so to cross over the frontier. He travelled on through towns and villages, he waited about on big and little railway stations, and by nightfall is at last there where he wishes to be.

Without delay he sets off down the street, through the town, and beyond it toward the heights.

Children are playing in the pools of light under the gas lamps. Workmen returning home come toward him. A couple of motor-cars whir past. Then it is quiet.

The twilight is still enough to enable him to see. And anyway, Rahe's eyes are used to the dark. He leaves the road and goes off across country. After a while he trips up; rusty barbed-wire has caught in his trousers and ripped a hole. He stoops to release it. It is the barbed-wire entanglement along an old battered trench. Rahe straightens himself up. Ahead stretch away the barren fields of battle.

In the uncertain twilight they appear a tormented, frozen
sea, a petrified storm, Rahe detects the sickly odour of
blood, of powder and earth, the wild smell of death, who is
still in this landscape and here has authority. Involuntarily
he draws in his head, his shoulders hunch, his arms hang
loosely forward, hands ready for a fall—no more the gait
of the cities—but the crouching, stealthy slinking of the
beast, the wary alertness of the soldier again——

He stops and studies the field. An hour ago it was still strange to him, but now he knows it again, every fold in the ground, every valley. He has never been away from it. In the rekindling of memory the months shrivel up like paper, they are consumed and vanish away like smoke. Once more Lieutenant Georg Rahe is crawling along through the night on patrol—and there has been nothing between. About him, only the silence of the evening and the faint wind in the grasses—but in his ears, the battle roars again. He sees the explosions heaving; parachute rockets hang in the sky above the desolation like gigantic arc lamps; the heaven coughs glowing-black and the earth, thundering from horizon to horizon, is churned into fountains and sulphurous craters.

Rahe clenches his teeth.—He is no dreamer, but he cannot withstand it—memory overwhelms him like a whirlwind.—Here is not peace, not the make-believe peace of the rest of the world; here is still struggle and war; here destruction is still mysteriously raging and its eddies lose themselves in the sky.

The earth clutches for him, it reaches out after him, as with hands; the yellow, thick clay, sticks to his shoes and makes his steps heavy, as though the dead would drag him, the survivor, down to themselves.

He is running over the black fields of craters. The wind is growing stronger, the clouds are driving fast and occasionally the moon pours its pale light over the landscape. And each time the light comes then Rahe stops dead, his heart stands still; he flings himself down and lies motionless, glued to the earth. He knows it is nothing—but again the next time, startled, he springs into a shell-hole. With open eyes and well aware, he yet submits to the law of this ground over which no man can walk upright.

The moon is a gigantic parachute rocket. The tree-stumps in the coppice stand out black in the moonlight. Beyond the ruins of the farm there slopes the gully through which no attack ever came. Rahe squats in a trench. Bits of a belt are lying there, a couple of mess-tins, a spoon, hand-grenades covered in mud, ammunition pouches, and beside them grey-green wet cloths, threadbare, already half turned to clay, the remains of a soldier.

He lies long on the ground, his face to the earth—and the silence is beginning to speak. In the earth is an immense hollow rumbling gasping breath, roaring, and again rumbling, clapping and clinking. He clutches his fingers into the earth and presses his head down against it, he thinks he hears voices and cries; he would like to ask, to 
speak, to cry out; he listens and waits for an answer, an 
answer to his life.

But only the wind rises, the clouds drive more swiftly and lower, and shadow chases shadow over the field. Rahe picks himself up and walks on without direction a long time, till at last he is standing before the black crosses, erect, one behind another in long rows, like a company, a battalion, a brigade, an army.

And suddenly he understands all.—Before these crosses the whole fabric of grand abstractions and fine phrases comes crashing down. Here alone the war still exists, no longer as in the minds and distorted memories of those who have come away from it. Here stand the lost years that have not been fulfilled, like a will o' the wisp over the graves; here the unlived life that finds no rest, cries out in roaring silence to the sky; here the strength and the will of a generation of youth that died before it could begin to live, is poured out in one vast lament upon the night.

Shudders creep over him. At one shrill burst he recognises the empty jaws where the truth, the valour and the life of a generation disappeared. The thought chokes him, it destroys him.

"Comrades!" he shouts to the wind and the night: "Comrades! We have been betrayed. We must march again! Against it I Against it! Comrades!"

He stands in front of the crosses. The moon breaks through, and he sees them gleaming, they rise out of the earth with widespread arms, already their tread comes on menacing; he stands before them, marks time. He stretches his hand onward: "Comrades—march!"

And his hand goes to his pocket and again the arm is lifted—a tired, lonely shot that is caught up by the wind and swept away—he staggers, he is down on his knees, he props on his arms and with a last effort turns again to the crosses—he sees them marching. They stamp and are in motion, they are marching, slowly, and their way is far; it will take long, but it leads forward; they shall come there and fight their last battle, the battle for life. They are marching in silence, a dark army, the longest way, the way into the heart. It will take many years—but what is time to them? They have broken camp, they are marching, they come.

His head sinks down. It grows dark about him, he falls forward: he is marching with the column. As one late finding his way home he lies there on the ground, his arms outspread, his eyes dull already and his knees drawn up. The body twitches once more, then all has become sleep; and now only the wind is still there on the desolate, dark waste, it blows and blows; above are the clouds and the sky, the fields and the endless wide plains with the trenches and shell-holes and crosses.

T
he earth is smelling of March and violets. Snowdrops are showing above the damp mould. The furrows of the field are shimmering purple.

We walk, down a path through the woods—Willy and Kosole in front, Valentin and I behind them. It is the first time for months that we have all been together. We do not often see one another.

Karl has lent us his new car for the day. He has not come himself, he has not the time. He has been making a mint of money these last few months, for the mark is falling and that favours his business. So his chauffeur has driven us out.

"What are you doing exactly, Valentin?" I ask.

"Going the round of the fairs," he replies. "With the swingboats."

I look at him in surprise. "Since when?"

"Oh, a long time. My partner—you remember her? she soon chucked me. She dances in a restaurant now. Foxtrots and tangoes. There's more demand for that these days. And, well you see, an old army hobo's not smart enough for that sort of thing."

"Do swingboats bring in much, then?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Don't talk about it! Not enough to live on, yet too much to die on, if you follow me. And this everlasting traipsing about! We're on the road again tomorrow. To Krefeld this time. Properly up the pole, as you might say, Ernst—What's become of Jupp, do you know?"

I shrug my shoulders. "Left town I think. Same as Adolf. One never sees anything of them."

"And Arthur?"

"He's well on his way to being a millionaire," I reply.

"He knows a thing or two!" nods Valentin sadly.

Kosole halts and" stretches his arms. "Well, boys, it's grand walking, no mistake—if only a man hadn't to be out of work in order to do it!"

"Don't you think you'll get something again soon?" asks Willy.

Ferdinand shakes his head. "It's not so easy. I'm on the black list, you see. Not docile enough. Still a man's healthy, that's something. I borrow a bit off Tjaden now and then to keep me going. He's well dug in among the suet."

We call a halt at a clearing in the wood. Willy hands round a box of cigarettes that Karl has given him. Valentin's face brightens. We sit down and smoke.

The tops of the trees creak softly. A few tits are twittering, and the sun is already strong and warm. Willy yawns largely and then stretches out on his overcoat. Kosole makes himself a sort of pillow of moss and lies down likewise. Valentin is sitting pensively on the trunk of a beech tree, watching a green ground beetle.

I look at the old familiar faces and in a moment everything seems changed—here we are, all squatting together again, as so often before—only we are fewer now—but are we really together still?

Kosole pricks up his ears. Out of the distance comes a
sound of voices. Young voices. It will be the Wandervogel,
the birds of passage, making a first ramble with their gui
tars and their ribbons this silver misted day. We used to do
the same before the war—Ludwig Breyer and Georg Rahe 
and I—— I  lean back and think of those times—the eve
ning round the camp fire, the folk-songs, the guitars and
the lovely nights full of stars over the tent. That was just
our youth. In the Wandervogel of those days was all the
fresh romance and enthusiasm of youth, that afterwards
still lingered on in the trenches a short while, only to col
lapse at last in 1917 under the awful horrors of the battle
of machines.

The voices are coming nearer.

I prop myself on my arms and raise my head to see the
procession go by. It is strange—only a few years back we 
still belonged to all that, and now it seems as if they were 
an entirely new generation, a generation to follow ours, 
that can take up again the things that we had to let fall——

Shouts resound. A full chime, almost a choir. Now but a single voice again, indistinct, not yet to be understood. Twigs break and the ground trembles to many footsteps. Again a shout. Again the footsteps; they stop; silence. Then, sharp and clear, a command: "Cavalry approaching on the right!—By squads, right wheel!—double march!"

Kosole jumps up. I also. We stare at one another—Are we bewitched?—What can that mean?