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The Road Back: A Novel (All Quiet on the Western Front) Paperback – January 27, 1998
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After four grueling years, the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable.
For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart, Ernst undergoes a crisis that teaches him what there is to live for—and what he has that no one can ever take away.
“The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review
- Print length324 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
- Publication dateJanuary 27, 1998
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.73 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100449912469
- ISBN-13978-0449912461
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Review
From the Inside Flap
After four grueling years the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable.
For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart, Ernst undergoes a crisis that teaches him what there is to live for--and what he has that no one can ever take away.
From the Back Cover
For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart, Ernst undergoes a crisis that teaches him what there is to live for -- and what he has that no one can ever take away.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ROADS STRETCH FAR through the landscape, the villages lie 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 a road, have sat in so many a truck, squatted in so many a dugout, crouched in so many a shell hole—without many words; so too now they trudge along this road back home into peace. Without many words.
Old men with beards and slim lads scarce twenty years of age, comrades without difference. Beside them their lieutenants, little more than children, yet the leaders of many a night raid. And behind them, the army of slain. Thus they tramp onward, step by step, sick, half-starving, without ammunition, in thin companies, with eyes that still fail to comprehend it: escaped out of that underworld, on the road back into life.
1
The company is marching slowly, for we are tired and have wounded with us. Little by little our group falls behind. The country is hilly, and when the road climbs we can see from the summit the last of our own troops withdrawing before us, and behind us the dense, endless columns that follow after. They are Americans. They pour on through the avenues of trees like a broad river and the restless glitter of their weapons plays over them. But around them lie the quiet fields, and the tree tops in their autumnal colours tower solemn and unconcerned above the oncoming flood.
We stopped for the night in a little village. Behind the houses in which we billeted flows a stream lined with willows. A narrow path runs beside it. One behind another in a long file we follow it. Kosole is in front. Behind him runs Wolf, the company mascot, and sniffs at his haversack.
Suddenly at the crossroad, where the path opens into the high road, Ferdinand springs back.
“Look out!”
On the instant our rifles are up and we scatter. Kosole crouches in the ditch by the roadside, ready to fire; Jupp and Trosske duck and spy out from behind a clump of elders; Willy Homeyer tugs at his hand-grenade belt; even our wounded are ready for fight.
Along the road are coming a few Americans. They are laughing and talking together. It is an advance patrol that has overtaken us. Adolf Bethke alone has remained unperturbed. He advances calmly a few paces clear of the cover. Kosole gets up again. The rest of us recover ourselves also, and embarrassed and sheepish, readjust our belts and our rifle slings—for, of course, fighting has ceased some days now.
At sight of us the Americans halt suddenly. Their talk stops. Slowly they approach. We retire against a shed to cover our backs, and wait. The wounded men we place in the middle.
After a minute’s silence an American, tall as a tree, steps out from the group, stands before us and beckoning, greets us.
“Hello, Kamerad!”
Adolf Bethke raises his hand in like manner. “Kamerad!” The tension relaxes. The Americans advance. A moment later and we are surrounded by them. Hitherto we have seen them so closely only when they were either prisoners or dead.
It is a strange moment. We gaze at them in silence. They stand about us in a semicircle, fine, powerful fellows; clearly they have always had plenty to eat. They are all young; not one of them is nearly so old as Adolf Bethke or Ferdinand Kosole—and they are not our oldest by a long chalk. On the other hand none is so young as Albert Trosske or Karl Bröger—and they are by no means the youngest of us.
They are wearing new uniforms and greatcoats; their boots are water-tight and fit well; their rifles are good and their pouches full of ammunition. They are all fresh and unused.
Compared to these fellows we are a perfect band of robbers. Our uniforms are bleached with the mud of years, with the rains of the Argonne, the chalk of Champagne, the bog waters of Flanders; our greatcoats ragged and torn by barbed wire, shell splinters and shrapnel, cobbled with crude stitches, stiff with clay and in some instances even with blood; our boots broken, our rifles worn out, our ammunition almost at an end; we are all of us dirty, all alike gone to wrack, all weary. The war has passed over us like a steam roller.
Yet more troops gather around us. The square is filled with curious eyes.
We stand in a corner grouped about our wounded men—not because we are afraid, but because we belong together. The Americans nudge one another and point at our old, worn-out gear. One of them offers Breyer a piece of white bread, but though hunger is apparent in his eyes, he does not take it.
With a sudden ejaculation one of them points to the bandages on our wounded. These are of crêpe paper, made fast with pack thread. They all have a look, then retire and whisper together. Their friendly faces are full of sympathy as they see that we have not even muslin bandages.
The man who first addressed us now puts a hand on Bethke’s shoulder. “Deutsche—gute Soldat,” he says, “brave Soldat.”
The others nod emphatically.
We make no answer. We are not yet able to answer. —The last weeks have tried us bitterly. We had to return again and again to the battle, losing our men to no purpose, yet we made no protest; we did as we have always done; and at the end our company had thirty-two men left of two hundred. —So we came out from it thinking no more, feeling no more than that we had faithfully done what had been laid upon us to do.
But now, under the pitying eyes of these Americans, we perceive how much in vain it has all been. The sight of their interminable, well-equipped columns reveals to us against what hopeless odds in man power and material we made our stand.
We bite our lips and look at each other. Bethke withdraws his shoulder from under the American’s hand; Kosole stares ahead into vacancy; Ludwig Breyer draws himself up—we grip our rifles more firmly; we brace our knees, our eyes become harder and our gaze does not falter. We look back once more over the country whence we have come; our faces become tight with suppressed emotion and once again the searing memory passes through us: all we have done, all we have suffered, and all that we have left behind.
We do not know what is the matter with us; but if a bitter word were now loosed against us, it would sting us to fury, and whether we wanted to or not we would burst forward, wild and breathless, mad and lost, to fight—in spite of everything, to fight again.
A thick-set sergeant with a ruddy face elbows his way toward us. Over Kosole, who stands nearest him, he pours a flood of German words. Ferdinand winces, it so astonishes him.
“He talks just the same as we do!” he says to Bethke in amazement; “what do you make of that, now?”
The fellow speaks German better and more fluently even than Kosole himself. He explains that he was in Dresden before the war, and had many friends there.
“In Dresden?” asks Kosole, even more staggered. “Why, I was there once myself for a couple of years——”
The sergeant smiles as though that identified him once and for all. He names the street where he had lived.
“Not five minutes from me!” exclaims Ferdinand excitedly. “Fancy not having seen one another! You will know Widow Pohl, perhaps, at the corner, Johannis Street? A fat old body with black hair. My landlady.”
But the sergeant does not know her and in exchange submits Zander, a clerk in the Treasury, whom Kosole in his turn cannot recall. Both of them, however, remember the Elbe and the castle, and their eyes light up with pleasure. Ferdinand seizes the sergeant by the arm. “Why, man—you talk German like a native! So you’ve been in Dresden, eh? —Man, but what have we two been fighting about?”
The sergeant laughs. He doesn’t know either. He takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers it to Kosole, who reaches for it eagerly—there is not a man of us but would willingly give his soul for a good cigarette. Our own are made from beech leaves and dried grass, and even those are only the better sort. Valentin Laher declares that the ordinary ones are made of seaweed and dried horse dung, and Valentin is a connoisseur of such things.
Kosole blows out the smoke lingeringly, with relish. We sniff enviously. Laher changes colour. His nostrils quiver. “Give’s a draw,” he says imploringly to Ferdinand. But before he can take the cigarette another American has offered him a packet of Virginia tobacco. Valentin looks at him incredulously. He takes it and smells it. His face lights up. Then reluctantly he returns the tobacco. But the other declines it and points energetically at the cockade on Laher’s forage cap, which is sticking out from the top of his haversack.
Valentin does not understand him. “He wants to exchange the tobacco for the cap badge,” explains the sergeant from Dresden. But Laher understands that even less. This spanking tobacco for a tin cockade? The man must be balmy. Valentin would not swop the packet for a commission. He offers the cap, badge and all, to the American, and with trembling hands greedily fills his first pipe.
And now we realize what is expected—the Americans want to exchange. It is apparent that they have not long been in the war; they are still collecting souvenirs, shoulder straps, badges, belt buckles, decorations, uniform buttons. In exchange we stock ourselves with soap, cigarettes, chocolate and tinned meat. They even want us to take a handful of money for our dog—but we draw the line there; let them offer what they will, the dog stays with us. On the other hand, our wounded bring us luck. One American, with so much gold in his mouth that his face looks like a brass foundry, is anxious to get some pieces of bandage with blood on them, in order to be able to demonstrate to the folk at home that they actually were made of paper. He is offering first-rate biscuits and, better still, an armful of real bandages in exchange. With the utmost satisfaction he carefully stows the rags away in his pocketbook, especially those belonging to Ludwig Breyer; for that is actual lieutenant’s blood, you see. Ludwig must write on it in pencil, the place, his name and regiment, so that every one in America may see the thing is no fake. He is unwilling at first—but Willy persuades him, for we need good bandages sorely. And besides, the biscuits are an absolute godsend to him with his dysentery.
But Arthur Ledderhose makes the best coup. He produces a box of Iron Crosses that he found in an abandoned Orderly Room. An American, as wizened as himself, with just such another lemon-yellow face, wants to buy the whole box at one deal. But Ledderhose merely gives him one long, knowing slant from his squinting eyes. The American returns the look just as impassively, just as seemingly harmless. One suddenly saw in them a family likeness, as of two brothers. —Something that has survived all the chances of war and death has flashed between them,—the spirit of trade.
Ledderhose’s antagonist soon sees that there is nothing doing. Arthur is not to be tricked; his wares will be decidedly more profitable disposed of in retail, so he barters them one by one, till the box is empty. About him there gradually rises up a pile of goods, even butter, and silk, eggs, linen and money, until finally he stands there on his bandy legs looking like a departmental store.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House Publishing Group; Reprint edition (January 27, 1998)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 324 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0449912469
- ISBN-13 : 978-0449912461
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.73 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #89,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #508 in Military Historical Fiction
- #1,471 in War Fiction (Books)
- #6,717 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Erich Maria Remarque (22 June 1898 – 25 September 1970), born Erich Paul Remark, was a German novelist who created many works about the terror of war. His best known novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) is about German soldiers in the First World War, which was also made into an Oscar-winning movie. His book made him an enemy of the Nazis, who burned many of his works.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by the original uploader was Володимир Ф at Ukrainian Wikipedia [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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These young guys, some barely out of their teens, still have only each other to lean on and help each other survive, just as they did at the Western Front. But, as happened to Paul and his buddies during the war, life crushes them one-by-one. (Those who miss Paul might be pleased that he comes back to make a brief appearance to his comrade as a ghost, although a tragic one.)
The story is heartbreaking but the writing is thoughtful and beautiful, as is the case with Remarque. The main character, Ernst, does a lot of reflecting on his lost boyhood and, as Thomas Woolf wrote, sadly concludes that "You can't go home again" ... especially not if you've spent years in hell, as he and his friends have done.
This translation does feel outdated and clunky in places. The conversations make the guys sound like a bunch of English lads. But the read is worth it. One cares about these young men, their fraternal love for each other, and their struggles to fit into post-war Germany, but the plot is really universal, not specific to that time and place. In the right hands, this story would also make a powerful movie. Netflix?
If you liked reading "All Quiet" and cared about Paul and the other youngsters there, then you'll like this novel as well.
Overall, you don't need to read this after All Quiet but that's like saying you don't NEED to bathe, like you can but you're better off doing so!
A top-notch sequel to the same author’s “All Quiet On the Western Front;” it’s still considered a sequel, even though the protagonist from the first novel in the series, Paul Bäumer, was killed at the end, as Paul and several other characters (such as Kat) are still referenced here.
While this novel is mainly about the transition from WWI to peacetime for these youthful soldiers (led by new protagonist Ernst) of a freshly defeated Germany, there are still plenty of harrowing battle scenes, between the opening chapter, flashback scenes, and hallucinations (PTSD, decades before the acronym was officially coined).
And even with the war being over, and not even counting the aforementioned PTSD (or “shell-shock” as they called it back then), the protagonist and his comrades find that peacetime has its own horrors, miseries, and difficulties (especially in a defeated nation).
RANDOM STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS (and noteworthy passages):
—p. 9: “Till now, the years of war had succeeded each other, year laid upon year, one year of hopelessness treading fast upon another, and when a man reckoned the time, his amazement was almost as great to discover it had been so long, as that it had been only so long.” The cruel paradox.
“We have even three old-timers still from ’fourteen—Bethke, Wessling and Kosole, who know everything and often speak of the first months as though that were away back in the olden days of the gods and the heroes.” In four years of war, an eternity indeed for the soldiers who’ve survived it that long.
—p. 10: “And suddenly I know what it is that has thrown us all into such a state of alarm. It has merely become still. Absolutely still. Not a machine gun, not a shot, not an explosion; no shriek of shells; nothing, absolutely nothing, no shot, no cry. It is simply still, utterly still. We look at one another; we cannot understand it. This is the first time it has been so quiet since we have been at the Front.” Deafening silence, eh?
—p. 11: “All at once—in the whirl of our excitement we had hardly observed it—the silence is at an end; once more, dully menacing, comes the noise of gunfire, and already from afar, like the bill of a woodpecker, sounds the knock-knocking of a machine gun. We grow calm and are almost glad to hear again the familiar, trusty noises of death.” The comfort of familiar misery.
—p. 13: Jeez-Louise, the WWI German Army handgun was a Luger semiautomatic pistol, NOT a “revolver!”
—p. 17: “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 realize 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.” Kinda like being released from prison after a long sentence?
—p. 18: Wow, a reference to Bäumer (protagonist and first-person narrator of “All Quiet On the Western Front”) and Kat (R.I.P.).
—pp. 33-34: “Breyer came to our company as a volunteer and was afterwards given a commission. It is not only with Trosske, Homeyer, Bröger and me that he talks familiarly—that goes without saying, of course, we were former schoolfellows—but, when no other officer is about, he is the same with all his old mates in the ranks. And his credit stands high in consequence.” Just like in my own country’s military, the prior-enlisted officers have the best credibility with their troops.
—p. 103: “Wolf accompanies me to the house, but he must stay outside—my aunt dislikes dogs of any sort. I ring.” Ugh, what a bitch; maybe she’s an ancestor of Ruth Graham or one of the other Slate.Com scumbags.
—p. 134: “tittlebacks,” same species as sticklebacks?
—p. 140: “Any soldier knows that a company commander may have the best of intentions, but if his noncoms. are against him he is powerless to effect anything. So, too, even the most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. —These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.” Ach, Scheisser, the Deep State, 1918 German style.
—p. 181: It’s hard to imagine a military reunion in the U.S. wherein social class distinctions would be so stark as to spoil the camaraderie.
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And then a few short years later it happened all over again.
When will we ever learn to live in harmony and peace
A psychologically astute writer whose interwar years strengthened his conviction that militarization served only politicians and profiteers, Remarque writes of the aftermath of war at a time when psychological wounds were dismissed as malingering or cowardice. Treatments were primitive and often cruel (electro therapy) and the afflicted faced an existence as shut-ins hidden away to shield sensitive civilians from the discomfort of tremor and spasm.
Yet his masterwork, written in 1931, describes a biologically based model of trauma based not on fMRIs but on the incontrovertible truth of his own lived experience.
The resulting novel achieves that rarest of balancing acts. It bears searing witness to the internal devastation borne by those not appearing on causality lists, while instilling hope that there is indeed a road back, if not by a route recognizable by any previous reckoning. And it demands accountability for the powerful interests that brought nations of warring young men together in slaughter.
One of those powerful old men, Rudyard Kipling, inspired a generation with stirring accounts of the glories of soldiering and defence of Empire, He had reportedly pulled strings to allow his son, then 18 but near-sighted, to join the Irish Guards. He died on his first patrol. Kipling, though not naming his son directly, must surely have had him in mind when he penned the epigram: "If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied." In The Road Back, Remarque fulfills that promise, both to those recognized by crosses, and to the millions more whose epitaphs read "died of natural causes", or who were lost to history altogether save police or medical reports diagnosing mental instability or criminality.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, unveiled in London in 19TK, recognized the problem of identifying the dead and missing when modern shells could vaporize combatants and leave bystanders wounded beyond recognition. Headstones with the inscription "Known Only To God" litter the manicured cemetaries of the Western Front.
A cynic might wonder -- why do so few people know that All Quiet has a sequel? It's certainly not required reading like its (rightly) famous predecessor. Was the battlefield account really so much stronger than its post-Armistice storyline?
One theory might be that the powerful feel safer with an anti-war book that focuses on a battlefield long past --a full century ago now, with sepia images of shattered trees, shell holes and mud showcased safely in the nearly universal agreement that it was A Bad War -- the ultimate example of senseless slaughter and the pity of war. Segments of the old trenches have been "preserved" (meaning sanitized for public safety, satisfying the liability concerns of the relevant authorities). You can take a tour, bringing your thermal mug as you walk the (brand new and inauthentically dry) duckboards and imagine what it might be like to go over the top.
How we remember war says much about contemporary society. In North America, every school child learns the poem In Flanders Fields. Live telecasts show politicians, citizens, veterans and grieving mothers standing with boweed heads as the familiar lines of John McRae's poem give voice to the dead of Flanders. The elegy brings tears of sorrow at all that has been lost. Arguably, it is our ability to conjure the images of nature (fields, poppies, larks) -- the peaceful natural world still available to the living -- that is a bridge between the living and the dead. It is also (although this is a point of contention), not anti-war. McRae calls on us to remember, but even more importantly, to act: “Take up our quarrel with the foe” -- to win victory lest the dead died in vain.
Contrast this with the focus of Wilfrid Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, who gives voice to the living, haunted by the images of a gas victim:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud(12)
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest(13)
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Owen did not survive the war. He was killed at TK Canal on November TK, 1918 -- TK days before the Armistice.
Remarque survived, and published The Road Back in 1931, to WHAT acclaim.
The thematic terrain of The Road Back threatens with its modern-day concerns. Post WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just a few, the issues of what war unleashes long after the troops come home continues in the headlines today. But news cycles are short. And it's possible that fiction may still have the power to engage hearts in a way that headlines can't. We can only hope.
The ongoing conflicts between the returning soldiers with their horror of what they have been through and those who have not seen it produces a harrowing book that really ought to be compulsory reading - particularly for Germans!
Having recently visited the Somme just after Armistice day, the image stays with me of the biggest German cemetery where the only wreath was from the British Legion.
The translation is old and pretty clunky - but you soon don't notice as the intensity of the book eats into you.
The collapse of the currency and the re-emergence of German militarism appear toward the end of the book and our knowledge of what happened next makes your blood run cold.
Maybe if more Germans had read it they would not be so keen now to put other European Countries to the economic sword in the way they appear to be doing.
But if more people had read it then Hitler would never have got where he did!
A MUST READ!!!