The Road Back (13 page)

We pile up together in a heap. Nobody wants to be in the front rows. Only Willy takes up his place there unembarrassed. In the semi-darkness of the hall his head is glowing like the red lamp outside a brothel.

I look at the group of masters.—For us they were once more than other men; not merely because they were in charge of us, but because, however much we may have made fun of them, we still believed in them. Today we see them merely as so many somewhat older men, and of whom we feel mildly contemptuous.

There they stand now and propose to teach us again. But we expect them to set aside some of their dignity. For after all, what can they teach us? We know life now better than they; we have gained another knowledge, harsh, bloody, cruel, inexorable. We could teach them for that matter-but who would be bothered? If a sudden raid were to be made on the hall just now, they would all be rushing about like a bunch of poodles, frightened out of their wits, without a ghost of an idea what to do, whereas not a man of us would lose his head. As the first thing to be done—merely that they should not be in the way—we should quietly lock them all up, and then begin the defence.

The Principal is clearing his throat for a speech. The words spring round and smooth from his mouth; he is an excellent talker, one must admit that. He speaks of the heroic struggle of the troops, of battles, of victories, and of courage. But for all the fine words, I feel there is a snag in it somewhere; perhaps just because of the fine words. It was not so smooth and round as all that—I look at Ludwig; he looks at me; Albert, Walldorf, Westerholt, it does not suit any of them.

The Principal is getting into his stride. He celebrates not
only the heroism out there, but now the quieter heroism at
home, also. "We at home here have done our duty, too; we
have pinched and gone hungry for our soldiers; we have
agonised; we have trembled. It was hard. Sometimes per
haps it has been almost harder for us than for our brave
lads in field-grey out yonder——"

"Hopla!" says Westerholt. Murmurs begin to be heard. The Old Man casts a sidelong glance in our direction and goes on: "But indeed such things are not to be weighed and nicely balanced. You have looked into the brazen face of Death without fear, you have discharged your great task. And though final victory has not accompanied our arms, yet all the more will we now stand together, united in passionate love of our afflicted Fatherland; in defiance of all hostile powers we will rebuild it; rebuild it in the spirit of our ancient teacher, Goethe, whose voice rings out now so commandingly across the centuries to our own troubled time: 'Let Might assail, we live and will prevail.'"

The Old Man's voice sinks to a minor. It puts on mourning, it drips unction. A sudden tremor passes over the black flock of masters. Their faces show self-control, solemnity —"But especially we would remember those fallen sons of our foundation, who hastened joyfully to the defence of their homeland and who have remained upon the field of honour. Twenty-one comrades are with us no more; twenty-one warriors have met the glorious death of arms; twenty-one heroes have found rest from the clamour of battle under foreign soil and sleep the long sleep beneath the green grasses——"

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 not
come 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 of
masters. "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 misunder
standing——"

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 hands
elapsed 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, first
takes the two pot plants from the lecture desk and smashes
them on to the floor. "I never could stomach vegetables any
way," he says viciously. The laurel wreath he plants askew
on 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.