by Pete Ayrton
Everyone is talking about peace or an armistice. Everyone is waiting. If there is another disappointment, they will collapse, the hopes are too strong, they can no longer be pushed aside without exploding. If there is no peace, then there will be a revolution.
I have been given fourteen days’ rest because I swallowed a bit of gas. I sit all day in a little garden in the sunshine. There will soon be an armistice, I believe in it too, now. Then we shall go home.
My thoughts stop there and I can’t push them on any further. What attracts me so strongly and awaits me are raw feelings – lust for life, desire for home, the blood itself, the intoxication of escaping. But these aren’t exactly goals.
If we had come back in 1916 we could have unleashed a storm out of the pain and intensity of our experiences. If we go back now we shall be weary, broken-down, burnt-out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no longer be able to cope.
No one will understand us – because in front of us there is a generation of men who did, it is true, share the years out here with us, but who already had a bed and a job and who are going back to their old positions, where they will forget all about the war – and behind us, a new generation is growing up, one like we used to be, and that generation will be strangers to us and will push us aside. We are superfluous even to ourselves, we shall grow older, a few will adapt, others will make adjustments, and many of us will not know what to do – the years will trickle away, and eventually we shall perish.
But perhaps all these thoughts of mine are just melancholy and confusion, which will be blown away like dust when I am standing underneath the poplars once again, and listening to the rustle of their leaves. It cannot have vanished entirely, that tenderness that troubles our blood, the uncertainty, the worry, all the things to come, the thousand faces of the future, the music of dreams and books, the rustling and the idea of women. All this cannot have collapsed in the shelling, the despair and the army brothels.
The trees here glow bright and gold, the rowan berries are red against the leaves, white country roads run on towards the horizon, and the canteens are all buzzing like beehives with rumours of peace.
I stand up.
I am very calm. Let the months come, and the years, they’ll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is still there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. But as long as life is there it will make its own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not.
*
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.
He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long – his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way.
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabruck, Germany, in 1898. He was conscripted into the German Army in 1915 and transferred to the Western Front. In combat in July 1917 he received multiple shrapnel wounds and was repatriated to a military hospital. All Quiet on the Western Front was written in 1927 but not published till 1929 as Remarque was not immediately able to find a publisher. The book was banned by the Nazis in 1933 and, along with his works, burned in public. That year Remarque and his wife fled to Porto Ronco in Switzerland. During the Second World War, the Nazis arrested his sister, Elfriede Scholz. She was beheaded in December 1943. The Court President declared at the trial: ‘Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach – you, however, will not escape us.’ The Remarques spent the war in the United States and returned to Porto Ronco in 1948. He died there in 1970.
All Quiet was an instant success: in its first eighteen months in print it sold 2.5 million copies in twenty-five languages. The film adaptation directed by Lewis Milestone won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1930. The book is a sympathetic portrayal of male camaraderie; it conveys the soldiers’ ability to steal moments of pleasure on the front. It is also the moving declaration of a lost generation.
PERMISSIONS
Every endeavour has been made to locate the copyright holders to the texts included here. Please could any copyright holders we were unable to locate get in touch with Serpent’s Tail.
*
Extracts from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and Timothy Brittain-Catlin, literary executors for the Vera Brittain Estate; Mulk Raj Anand Across the Black Waters © Oriental Paperbacks; Siegfried Sassoon Memoirs of an Infantry Officer © Faber and Faber; Mary Borden The Forbidden Zone © Patrick Aylmer; Gabriel Chevallier Fear © Le Dilettante; Emilio Lussu A Soldier on the Southern Front © Giovanni Lussu; Wyndham Lewis Blasting and Bombardiering © Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust; Richard Aldington Death of a Hero © Penguin Books; Stratis Myrivilis Life in the Tomb © Quartet Books; Raymond Escholier Mahmadou Fofana © Françoise Escholier-Achard; Robert Musil The Blackbird, translation from the German by Peter Wortsman, from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil © Archipelago Books; Liviu Rebreanu The Forest of the Hanged © Peter Owen Books; Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Švejk trans. © Cecil Parrott; Miroslav Krleža The Croatian God Mars ©HDP Croatian Writers’ Society; Viktor Shklovsky A Sentimental Journey © Cornell University Press; Ernst Jünger War Diary 1914–1918 © Klett-Cotta; Jules Romains The Prelude to Verdun © Knopf; Jean Giono To the Slaughterhouse © Peter Owen Books; Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, trans. © Ralph Manheim; Isaac Babel The Complete Works © W. W. Norton;Willa Cather One of Ours © Little, Brown UK, Knopf US; Irene Rathbone We that Were Young © Nicholas Utechin; Rose Macaulay Non-Combatants and Others © Capuchin Classics; Josep Pla The Grey Notebook © New York Review of Books; A. P. Herbert The Secret Battle © Frontline Books;Vahan Totovents Scenes from an Armenian Childhood ©Mischa Kudian; James Hanley The German Prisoner © The James Hanley Estate;Theodor Plievier The Kaiser’s Coolies © Kiwi Verlag; Arnold Zweig The Case of Sergeant Grischa © Carlton Books; Joseph Roth The Radetzky March © Granta Books; Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front © Random House; Prežihov Voranc Doberdob © Copyright Agency of Slovenia; Carlo Emilio Gadda Journals of War and Prison © Garzanti Books.
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