I stand up slowly.
‘Do you want to take his pay book and his things?’ the orderly asks me.
I nod and he gives them to me.
The orderly is baffled. ‘You’re not related, are you?’
No, we are not related.
Am I walking? Do I still have legs? I look up, I look about me. And then I turn right round, and then I stop. Everything is just the same as usual. It’s only that Private Stanislaus Katczinsky is dead.
After that I remember nothing.
XII
It’s autumn. There are not many of the old lot left. I am the last one of the seven from our class still here.
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[264] restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front.
He had sunk forwards[265] 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 was almost happy that it had turned out that way.
Afterods
It is now approaching seventy years since Erich Maria Remarque’s first major novel, Im Westen nichts Neues (literally ‘Nothing New on the Western Front’), appeared, first in a magazine, and then in book form, and we are eighty years from the start of the war – supposedly the war to end all wars – in which the novel is set. But just as the Great War of 1914 – 18 did not end all wars, but simply set the pattern for new and ever more mechanized killing, Remarque’s novel has lost none of its impact and none of its relevance; while Remarque himself, the centenary of whose birth is now not too far away, is gradually becoming increasingly accepted as a major German writer.
Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabruck in Northern Germany on 22 June 1898. His original name was Erich Paul Remark, but when he published All Quiet on the Western Front he changed his middle name in memory of his mother, and reverted to an earlier spelling of the family name to dissociate himself from a novel that he had published in 1920, Die Traumbude, about art and decadence (the tide of which means ‘The Den of Dreams’). It has not been published in English. Remarque’s name was not Kramer – Remark spelt backwards – even though this tale is still found in reference works from time to time.
Remarque was sixteen, then, when the First World War broke out, and he was educated – since his family was Catholic – at Catholic schools, and then at a teachers’ seminary in Osnabruck, until he was called up for military service on 26 November 1916. After training in the CaprivI Barracks in Osnabruck (which he transformed into the Klosterberg barracks in his novel), he was sent on 12 June 1917 to a position behind the Arras front. During the offensive in Flanders which began on 31 July 1917, and is usually known in English as ‘Third Ypres’ or ‘Passchendaele’, Remarque was wounded by British shell-splinters, and taken eventually to the military hospital in Duisburg. During this period his mother died. He stayed on for some time as a clerk in the hospital, returned for training to Osnabruck in October 1918, and was there when the war ended. After the war he completed his teacher training and taught for a fairly short time, then worked in various different jobs, including advertising, and in 1924 began working on a magazine called Sport im Bild (Sport in Pictures) in Berlin. In 1925 he married a dancer, (Jutta) Use Zambona, from whom he was divorced in 1931. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 (and burned his books, claiming that All Quiet on the Western Front was a betrayal of the German front-line soldier), Remarque went to Switzerland. The Nazis deprived him of his German citizenship in 1938, and in that year (the circumstances are somewhat difficult to determine, and reports of dates and details vary) he remarried Use Zambona so that she, too, could get away, though they seem to have lived apart. They were divorced eventually in 1951. With the assistance of his friend, Marlene Dietrich, he was given a visa for the United States, and left France in 1939 on the last transatlantic sailing of the Queen Mary before the war. He settled in America, spending time in Hollywood, and then New York. Remarque was a high-profile figure, and very much part of the Hollywood and the European emigre celebrity circuit (though he was unable to make close contact with two other famous literary emigres, Brecht and Thomas Mann). His close friendship with Marlene Dietrich continued, and his other exotic companions included Greta Garbo. In 1943, his sister Elfuede was executed by the Nazis, ostensibly for making defeatist comments, and presumably also for being the sister of the by then unreachable Remarque. The author himself said that she had been involved with the resistance against the Nazis, and was pleased when a street in Osnabruck was named after her in 1968. Remarque became an American citizen in 1947, and refused to apply for the return of his German citizenship on the grounds that it had been taken from him illegally. In 1948 he returned to Switzerland, and lived there much of the time for the rest of his life. He married the film actress Paulette Goddard in 1958. On 25 September 1970, he died of heart failure, and is buried in Switzerland.