Back from war

Heretofore it was only death or wounds or temporary transfers that depleted the company. Now peace must be reckoned with.

Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

For soldiers returning from war, the road back can be much longer than the journey home. Other novels have made this point, but Erich Maria Remarque's The Road Back (1930) ranks as a classic, just as his more famous novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, is the classic World War I novel. This novel is a sequel to the other, even though they share few characters in common because so many characters in the earlier novel, including the protagonist, did not survive.

Ernst and a few other survivors from his company return to Germany when the war ends and find peace a difficult adjustment. There are no officers to tell them what to do. There are choices to be made again, employment to  be sought. Women reenter their lives in confusing ways. How does one sleep in silence? Perhaps most difficult of all, peace separates them even more surely than war did. They are on their own.

That a former soldier should miss the good old days of deadly combat seems odd, but Remarque makes it convincing. It's not just the radical change, of course, but also the trauma left by years of constant fear and extreme violence.

Insightful passages abound in the novel, as when Ernst sees a lovely scene and observes, "We see no countryside now, only terrain, — terrain for attack and defence. The old mill on the top there is no mill, but a strong point; the wood is no wood, it is artillery cover, — Such things will always creep in."

Other passages are just beautifully written, such as this description of a foggy night: "The street lamps have big yellow courtyards of light about them and the people are walking on cotton wool. Shop windows show up to right and left like mysterious fires. Wolf swims up through the fog and dives into it again."

For all the novel's pessimism, Remarque ends with a hint of optimism. "Perhaps I shall never be really happy again; perhaps the war has destroyed that, and no doubt I shall always be a little inattentive and nowhere quite at home — but I shall probably never be wholly unhappy either — for something will always be there to sustain me, be it merely my own hands, or a tree, or the breathing earth."

This novel, like All Quiet on the Western Front, was banned and burned in Germany under the Nazis. Remarque moved to Switzerland in 1932, wrote a number of other novels and married an American film star, Paulette Goddard. For this war veteran, the road back seems to have been a little easier than it was for his characters.