The Road Back (16 page)

He stoops down to me. "I think I'm going to become a soldier again."

"You're crazy, Georg!" I say in consternation.

"Not at all," he retorts, and for an instant is deadly earnest, "perhaps merely logical."

I stop. "But, good God, Georg——"

He walks on. "Well, you see, I've been here now a couple of weeks longer than you," he says and starts talking of other things.

When the first houses appear I take my jar with the tittlebats and empty it back into the brook. With a flick of the tail they are gone. The jar I leave standing on the bank.

I take leave of Georg and he walks off slowly down the street. In front of our house I stand still and look after him. His words have strangely troubled me. A vague, threatening something seems to be sneaking upon me; it retreats when I try to grapple with it, it disperses when I advance upon it, and then it gathers again behind me and watches.

The sky hangs like lead over the low shrubbery of the Luisenplatz, the trees are bare, a loose window is clashing in the wind, and amid the frowsy alderbushes in the garden of the square squats the November twilight, dank and cheerless.

I peer over into it; and suddenly it is as if I saw it all today for the first time, so unfamiliar that I hardly know it again. This dirty, damp patch of grass, was this really the setting of those years of my childhood, so radiant and winged in my memory? This waste, dreary square with the factory yonder, can this be that quiet corner of earth we called "Home," and which alone amid the waters of destruction out there meant hope to us and salvation from perishing in the flood? Or was it not rather a vision of some far other place than this grey street with its hideous houses, that rose up there over the shell-holes like some wild, sad dream in the drudging intervals between death and death? In my memory was it not far more shining and lovely, more spacious and abounding with ten thousand things? Is that no longer true, then? Did my blood lie and my memory deceive me?

I shiver.—It is different, yet without having changed. The clock in the tower of Neubauer's factory is still going; it strikes the hours still, as in the days when we used to stare up at its face to see the finger move. The black boy with the clay pipe is still sitting over the tobacconist's shop where Georg Rahe bought us our first cigarettes; and in the grocer's opposite is the same picture advertising the same soap-powder. Otto Vogt and I scorched its eyes out with a burning-glass one sunny time. I peer in through the window—the seared spots are still visible even now. But the war lies between, and Otto Vogt was killed at Kemmel long ago.

I do not understand how it can be that I should stand here, and yet no longer feel about it as I did then in the barracks and out there in the shell-holes. What has become of all its riches, the thrill, the brightness, the glamour, and that other that is unnameable? Had my memory more of life in it than the reality itself? Or has that become reality, while this has shrunk and shrivelled up, till now nothing is left of it but bare scaffolding where gay banners once waved? Did the splendour detach itself from these things and places, now only to float over them like a forlorn cloud. Did the years out there burn the bridges that lead back into the past?

Questions, questions—but no answer.

The orders regulating the attendance at school of the returned soldiers have arrived. Our delegates have achieved what we wanted—a shortened course, a separate syllabus, for the soldiers and an easing of the examination requirements.

It was no simple mater to put through, despite the Revolution; all this commotion has been nothing but a mere rippling of the surface. It has not gone under. What is the good of merely changing the occupants of a half a dozen of the top posts? Any soldier knows that a company commander may have the best of intentions, but if his non-coms, 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.

It is the first hour of lessons, and we are seated again at our desks. Almost all are in uniform, three have full beards, and one is married.

On my desk I discover my name neatly carved with a penknife and picked out in ink. I can remember doing it one history lesson; yet it seems it must have been a hundred years ago, so strange is it to be sitting here again. This sets the war back into the past; things have gone full circle—But we are no longer in it.

Hollermann, our Literature teacher, comes in and at once sets about what he considers his first duty. He must return to us such things of ours as still remain here from the days before the war. They have too long been a burden on his orderly schoolmaster's soul. He opens the class-locker and turns out the stuff—writing materials, drawing boards and, most important of all, the fat, blue note-books full of essays, dictations, and class exercises. A great pile they tower up beside him on the left of his desk. The names are called out, we answer and receive our goods. Willy tosses them over and blotting papers go flying.

"Breyer——" "Here——"

"Bucker——" "Here——"

"Detlefs——"

Silence. "Dead," cries Willy.

Detlefs—little, fair, bandy, was plucked in his exam, once and left behind. A lance-corporal, killed, 1917, at Mount Kemmel. The note-book goes to the right of the master's desk.

"Dirker——" "Here——"

"Dierksmann——" "Dead."

Dierksmann—a farmer's son, a good skat player, but a rotten singer; killed at Ypres. The note-book passes to the right.

"Eggers——"

"Not back yet," calls Willy. Ludwig supplements: "Lung-wound, in the Reserve Hospital at Dortmund, to go from there to the Sanatorium at Lippspring for three months."

"Friederichs——" "Here "

"Giesecke——" "Missing."

"No, he's not," says Westerholt.

"Well, he was reported missing," says Reinersmann.

"I know," replies Westerholt, "but he's been in the asylum here for the last three weeks. I've seen him myself."

"Gehring I——" "Dead."

Gehring I—a First, wrote verses, used to give coaching lessons, and bought books with his earnings. Killed at Soissons, along with his brother.

"Gehring II," the master merely murmurs and himself puts the note-book with the others on the right.

"He wrote really excellent essays," he says meditatively, turning the pages of Gehring I's exercise book once more.

Yet many another book goes to the right, and when at last all have been called, there still remains a big pile of unclaimed exercises. Professor Hollermann looks at them irresolutely. His feeling for order rebels, yet he does not know what to do with them. At last he hits on a solution—Let the notebooks be sent to the dead men's parents.

But Willy does not agree. "Think their parents will be glad to see exercise books so full of mistakes?" he asks, "and with your comments:
Unsatisfactory, Incompetent, Poor
. Better leave it alone rather!"

Hollermann looks at him with round eyes. "Yes, that's so; but what else can I do with them?"

"Let them stay where they are," says Albert.

Hollermann is almost offended. "But that won't do at all, Trosske," he says. "These notebooks, you see, they don't belong to the school, they cannot just be left where they are."

"Oh, God! what a fuss you do make!" groans Willy, running his fingers through his hair. "Give them to us then, we'll see to them." Hollermann hands them over reluctantly. "But"—he begins nervously, for, of course, it is other men's property.

"Oh, quite, quite," says Willy, "anything you like, all in order, properly stamped and addressed, only for Christ's sake don't fret yourself, whatever you do. One must have order, even though it may cause other people pain." He, winks at us and touches his forehead.

When the lesson is over we turn through the pages of our exercise books. The last theme on which we wrote is entitled:
Why Must Germany Win the War?
That was the beginning of 1916. There must be an introduction, six reasons, and a conclusion. Point four—"The religious reasons," I appear not to have resolved very successfully. In the margin in red ink there is written:
Scamped and unconvincing
. My seven-page effort was rewarded with a grand total of minus two—a very fair result, if one takes present facts into consideration.

Willy is reading over his notes on Natural History: "The Windflower and its rooting system!" he exclaims, and looks about him with a grin. "Well, I think the gentlemen will agree that that little matter has lapsed—no?"

"Agreed!" says Westerholt.

Yes, it has lapsed, indeed. We have forgotten it all, and by that fact alone the whole system stands condemned. What Bethke and Kosole taught us, that we do not forget.

During the afternoon Albert and Ludwig call round for me. We want to see how things are going with our old schoolmate, Giesecke. On the way we meet Georg Rahe who accompanies us, as he also was a friend of Giesecke.

The day is clear, and from the hill-top, where the building stands, one can see far out across the fields to where the lunatics in their blue-and-white striped jackets are at work in gangs under the supervision of uniformed warders. From a window in the right wing of the building we hear a voice singing:
On the lovely banks of Saale
. . . That will be a 
patient. It sounds strangely from a window with iron bars: 
And the clouds go sailing by——
 

Giesecke is lodged in a large, room with several other patients. As we enter one cries out shrilly: "Cover! Cover!" and crawls under the table; but the others take no notice of him. Giesecke comes at once to meet us. He has a narrow, yellow face; with his sharp chin and prominent ears he looks much younger than he used to do. Only his eyes are restless and old.

Before we can greet him, someone else buttonholes us: "Anything new out there?" he asks.

"New? no, nothing new," I reply.

"And what about the Front? Have we got Verdun yet?"

We look at each other. "But it's peace long ago," says Albert reassuringly.

The man laughs, an unpleasant, bleating laughter. "Don't you kid yourself! They're only trying to fool you. They're just waiting for us to come out, and then tara, before you know where you are, they've nabbed you and you're off back up the line." And he adds slyly: "But they won't catch me again!"

Giesecke shakes hands with us. This rather takes us aback; we imagined he would be hopping about like a monkey, and raving and pulling faces, or at any rate, shivering all the time, like the shakers at the street corners. But instead he only smiles at us with a wry, poor mouth, saying: "Didn't expect it to be like this, eh?"

"But you're quite fit!" I protest; "What's up with you, then?"

He passes his hand over his brow. "Head aches," says he.
"A sort of steel band round the back of my head. And
then Fleury——"

He was buried during the fighting at Fleury, and for several hours he lay with another fellow, his face clamped by a beam against the other man's crutch that was ripped up as far as the belly. The other had his head free and kept crying out, again and again, and each time he yelled a stream of blood would well out over Giesecke's face. Then gradually the intestines pressed themselves out of the belly and threatened to suffocate Giesecke, so that he had to squash them back to get air, and each time, as he dug into them, he would hear the other man bellow.

He tells us all this quite clearly and consequently. "And now every night it comes again, and I suffocate, and the room is full of slimy white snakes and of blood."

"But when you know what it is, can't you fight against it?" asks Albert.

Giesecke shakes his head. "It's no good, even though I may be wide awake. As soon as it gets dark, they are there." He shudders. "You don't see them, but I see them. I jumped out of a window at home and broke my leg. Then they brought me here."

"But how about you? what are you doing now?" asks Giesecke. "Had your exams, yet?"

"Soon," says Ludwig.

"I suppose that's all over for me," says Giesecke sadly. "They wouldn't let a chap like me loose among children!"

The man who had cried "Cover" as we entered now sneaks up behind Albert and digs him in the back of the neck. Albert swings round, but he remembers in time. "A.I.," sniggers the man, "A.I.," and he roars with laughter. Then suddenly he is solemn again and goes softly into a corner.

"Couldn't you write to the major?" asks Giesecke.