The Road Back (27 page)

Darkness comes away in great clots under my clutching hands. With a crash something falls down beside me. I strike upon stones, on sharp corners, iron; I shriek uncontrollably, swift wild yelling, I cannot stop. Shoutings, clutching at my arms. I beat them off; somebody trips over me. I snatch a rifle, grope for cover; I wrench the weapon to my shoulder, pull the tigger, still yelling. Then suddenly, like a knife, it pierces the uproar. "Birkholz"— again—"Birkholz"—I jump up. That's help coming! I must cut my way through! I wrench free, I run. A blow on my knee, and I fall into a soft hollow, into light, shrill, stabbing light—"Birkholz"—"Birkholz"—now nothing but my own cry like a spear in space. Suddenly it breaks.

The farmer and his wife are standing before me. I am lying half on the bed and half on the floor. The farmer beside me is picking himself up. I am desperately clutching a walking-stick in my hand, as if it were a rifle. I must be bleeding somewhere—then I see it is only the dog licking my hand.

"Teacher!" says the farmer's wife trembling. "Teacher! whatever is the matter?"

I understand nothing. "How have I come here?" I ask in a gruff voice.

"But teacher—wake up—you've been dreaming."

"Dreaming," I say. "You think I could have dreamed 
that!" Suddenly I burst out laughing, laughing, shrill, it 
racks me, shrieks of laughter, that it pains me, laughter—

Then the laughter in me suddenly dies. "It was the 
English Captain," I whisper. "The one——"

The farmer is busily rubbing his bruised arm. "You were 
dreaming, teacher, and fell out of bed," he is saying. "You 
wouldn't listen to anything, and you nearly murdered 
me——"

I do not understand him. I am utterly spent and forlorn. Then I see the stick in my hand. I put it away and sit down on the bed. The dog pushes in between my knees.

But I do not lie down again. I wrap myself in a blanket and sit at the table. The light I leave burning.

And so I sit a long while, motionless and with absent

 
gaze, as only soldiers can sit when they are alone. After a


time I begin to be disturbed and have a feeling as if some


one else were in the room. Slowly, how slowly! without

 
effort, I feel sight and perception returning to my eyes. I

 
raise my eyelids a trifle and see that I am sitting directly

 
opposite the mirror that hangs over the little wash-stand.

 
From its slightly wavy surface there looks out at me a face 


with dark shadows and black eye-hollows. My face——

I get up and take down the mirror and put it away in a corner, glass to the wall.

Morning comes. I go to my class. There sit the little ones with folded arms. In their eyes is still all the shy astonishment of the childish years. They look up at me so trustingly, so believingly—and suddenly I get a spasm over the heart.

Here I stand before you, one of the hundreds of thousands of bankrupt men in whom the war destroyed every belief and almost every strength. Here I stand before you, and see how much more alive, how much more rooted in life you are than I. Here I stand and must now be your teacher and guide. What should I teach you? Should I tell you that in twenty years you will be dried-up and crippled, maimed in your freest impulses, all pressed mercilessly into the selfsame mould? Should I tell you that all learning, all culture, all science is nothing but hideous mockery, so long as mankind makes war in the name of God and humanity with gas, iron, explosive and fire? What should I teach you then, you little creatures who alone have remained unspotted by the terrible years?

What am I able to teach you then? Should I tell you how to pull the string of a hand-grenade, how best to throw it at a human being? Should I show you how to stab a man with a bayonet, how to fell him with a club, how to slaughter him with a spade? Should I demonstrate how best to aim a rifle at such an incomprehensible miracle as a breathing breast, a living heart? Should I explain to you what tetanus is, what a broken spine is, and what a shattered skull? Should I describe to you how brains look when they spatter about, what crushed bones are like, and intestines when they pour out? Should I mimic how a man with a stomach-wound will groan, how one with a lung-wound gurgles and one with a head-wound whistles? More I do not know. More I have not learned.

Should I take you to the green-and-grey map there, move my finger across it and tell you that here love was murdered? Should I explain to you that the books you hold in your hands are but nets with which men design to snare your simple souls, to entangle you in the undergrowth of fine phrases, and in the barbed wire of falsified ideas?

I stand here before you, a polluted, a guilty man and can only implore you ever to remain as you are, never to suffer the bright light of your childhood to be misused as a blow-flame of hate. About your brows still blows the breath of innocence. How then should I presume to teach you? Behind me, still pursuing, are the bloody years. How then can I venture among you? Must I not first become a man again myself?

I feel a cramp begin to spread through me, as if I were turning to stone, as if I were crumbling away. I lower myself slowly into the chair, and realise that I cannot stay here any longer. I try to take hold of something but cannot. Then after a time that has seemed to me endless, the catalepsy relaxes. I stand up. "Children," I say with difficulty, "you may go now. There will be no school today."

The little ones look at me to make sure I am not joking.

 
I nod once again. "Yes, that is right—go and play today


—the whole day—go and play in the wood—or with your


dogs and your cats—you need not come back till tomor


row——"

With a clatter they toss their pencil-boxes into their stachels, and twittering and breathless they scurry off.

I pack up my things and go over to the neighbouring village to take leave of Willy. He is leaning out of the window in his shirt-sleeves, practising
In the merry month of May, all things are renewed,
on the fiddle. A huge supper is spread out on the table.

"My third today," he says gaily. "You know, I find I can eat like a camel, from pure foresight."

I tell him that I mean to quit this evening. Willy is not a man to ask questions. "Well, Ernst," he says thoughtfully, "it certainly is slow here, I admit—but so long as they keep feeding me like this," he points to the table, "not ten horses will drag me out of this Pestalozzi horse-box."

Thereupon he hauls out from under the sofa a large case of bottled beer. "High frequency," he beams, and holds the labels up to the lamp.

I look at him a long while. "Ah, Willy, I wish I were like you!"

"I can believe it," he grins and a cork pops. 

As I go to the station, a couple of little girls with smeary mouths and flying hair-ribbons come running out from the neighbouring house. They have just been burying a dead mole in the garden, so they tell me, and have said a prayer for him. Then they curtsy and shake hands with me. "Goodbye, Herr Teacher."

E
rnst, I must speak with you a moment," says my father.

I can guess what is coming. For days he has been going about with an anxious air dropping hints. But I have always escaped him until now, for I am not often at home.

We go to my room. He sits down on the sofa and looks uncomfortable. "We are worried about your future, Ernst." I produce a box of cigars from the bookcase and offer them to him. His face brightens a little, they are good cigars. I had them from Karl, and Karl smokes no beech-leaf.

"Have you really given up your position as a teacher?" he asks. I nod.

"And why did you do that, may I ask?"

I shrug my shoulders. How should I even begin to explain it to him? We are two utterly different men and have got along well together thus far only because we have not understood one another at all.

"And what do you propose doing now?" he goes on.

"Oh, anything," I say. "It's all one to me."

He looks at me shocked, and begins to talk about a good and respected calling, about getting on and making a place in life for myself. I listen to him sympathetically but am bored. How strange that this man on the sofa here should be the father who formerly regulated my life! Yet he was not able to look after me in the years out there; he could not even have helped me in the barracks—any N.C.O. there carried more weight than he. I had to get through as best as I could by myself, and it was a matter of entire indifference whether he existed or not.

When he has finished I pour him out a glass of cognac. "Now listen, father," I say, and sit down over against him, "you may be right in what you say. But you see, I have learned how to live in a hole in the ground on a crust of bread and a little drop of thin soup. And so long as there was no shelling I was quite content. An old hut seemed to me to be positive luxury, and a straw mattress in the rest area was paradise. So you see, the mere fact that I am still alive and that there is no shelling, is enough for me for the moment. What little I need to eat and drink I can rake together all right, for the rest there is my whole life before me."

"Yes," he objects, "but that is no life, a bare hand to
mouth existence like that——"

"Every man to his taste." I say. "To me it would seem no life to be able to say at the finish that I had entered every day for thirty years the same schoolroom or the same office."

Rather astonished he replies: "It's twenty years now that I have been going to the carton factory, yet I have always contrived to be my own master."

"I don't want to contrive to be anything, father, all I want is to live."

"And I have lived, and uprightly and respectably, too," he says with an accession of pride. "It wasn't for nothing I was elected to the Chamber of Commerce."

"Then be thankful that you have had it so easy," I retort.

"But you must do something, you know," he complains.

"I can get a job for the present with one of my army pals; as a matter of fact he has already offered me one," I say. "That will bring in all I need."

He shakes his head. "And for that you would give up a good civil-service job!"

"I have often had to give up things before now, father." He puffs away at his cigar distressfully. "And even assured of a pension, too!"

"Ach," I say laughing, "where's the soldier will live to see sixty? There are things in our bones that will only show themselves later. We'll all have packed up before then, don't you worry." With the best will in the world I cannot believe I shall reach sixty. I have seen too many men die at twenty.

I smoke away thoughtfully and look at my father. I still see that this, is my father, but also I can see he is just a kindly, somewhat older man, rather cautious and pedantic, whose views have no longer any meaning for me. I can quite well picture what he would have been at the Front—somebody would always have had to be looking after him one way or another, and he would certainly never have become an N.C.O.

I go to see Ludwig. He is sitting amid a pile of pamphlets
and books. I should like to talk with him about many
things that are troubling me; for I have a feeling that he
might perhaps be able to show me a way. But he himself is
disturbed and agitated today. We talk a while aimlessly
of this and of that, then at last he says: "I must go to the
doctor now——"

"The dysentery still?" I ask.

"No—something else."

"Why, what's the matter now, Ludwig," I ask in surprise.

He is silent a while. His lips quiver. Then he says:

"I don't know."

"Like me to come with you? I haven't anything particu
lar to do——"

He hunts for his cap. "Yes, do come."

As we walk he takes occasional stealthy, sidelong looks at me. We turn down Linden Street and go in at a house that has a small cheerless front garden with a few miserable shrubs in it. I read the white enamel plate on the door:
Dr. Friedrich Schultz, Specialist in Skin, Urinary and Sexual Diseases
. I stand still. "What's up, then, Ludwig?"

He turns a pale face toward me. "Nothing much, Ernst. I had a sort of a boil out there once, and it's come back again now."

"Oh, why if that's all it is, Ludwig," I say relieved, "you should have seen some of the carbuncles I've had! As big as a baby's head, some of them. Comes from all this substitute food muck we've had."