The Road Back
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Little, Brown, $2.50]
The Road Back is the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front: it takes up the tale of Number Two Platoon at a point about a week before the Armistice and carries it a year into the turmoil of the peace. During that period the platoon ceases to be a homogeneous body. Its members become individuals again and drift apart, each trying to readjust himself to the intricacies and conventions of civil life.
Young Ernst, the schoolboy narrator of All Quiet, is again the Pepys of the platoon, Some of the characters, like himself, had left home as schoolboys, others as men, but for all the continuity of life had been broken and the difficulties of reëntry bore heavily. Prom the very first night at home, when one of them succeeds in scrounging the neighbor’s prize cock and Ernst himself tries to get into bed with his boots on, we are given a picture of the struggle for rehabilitation made only more difficult by uncertainties of the time when German money ceased to have any power to buy the bare necessities of life.
As in All Quiet, there is no plot of a conventional kind. The story, in a series of incidents, is devoted to the rediscovery of conventional values by the characters. The cobbler, hampered by the lack of leather, returns to his last. The students, of whom Ernst was one, brushing aside the principal’s flowery oration of welcome, return unhappily to their desks.
Each meets the situation in his own way. Ledderhose achieves wealth in the shady business of smuggling. Tjaden marries the unlovely daughter of the butcher as the only means of ensuring a proper supply of meat at meals. Ludwig and Georg commit suicide, Kosole a murder, and Weil is shot in dramatic circumstances by his late captain, now in command of the local Reichwehr. In the seeking to show the return from the madness of war to the normalcy of peace, one gains the impression that the rôles have somehow become reversed and that we are being shown instead the unfortunate situation of well-balanced minds plunged from the commonplace and sanity of battle into the horrors and hysteria of peace.
In Ernst himself we have those constantly recurring bad dreams, quite familiar to all of us in the first month or two after the war. Horrible situations come back to him and send him rolling out of bed in a sweat of terror. Re becomes a schoolmaster and throws up his job merely because he is feeling restless. Those are the true accompaniments of the returned warrior. True, too, is the picture of his visit to Bruno, the sniper, crack shot of the local rifle club, who can feel no pity or regret for the bull’s-eyes he scored in war. A normal, respectable, rather attractive citizen fondling his small daughter and mending her paper boats, Bruno expresses surprise that anyone should feel that way—he took a proper pride in his work.
Bruno stands out as the magnificently normal type of man who formed a very large part of every army. To be seriously deranged by the war required a certain amount of imagination. The lack of it was fortunately more usual than its gift, and the vast majority of soldiers slid naturally back into the old ruts. Too many of the author’s characters found life unbearably hard, even taking into account the fact that post-war Germany, with her starvation, economic ruin, and disillusion, gave her veterans a home-coming much grimmer than any the victors experienced.
An undeniable strain of morbidity runs through the book. The references to the war are, as earlier, confined to its most unpleasant sides. But it is when the author is writing, not of belly wounds, but of the Germany of the peace, that he is at his best.
One cannot avoid the feeling that the author has tried to recapture the spirit with which he set down All Quiet on the Western Front, Crude and amateurish in places although that book was, even in the reticent form in which it was published in this country, it bore all the stamp of greatness. The Road Back does not impress this reader so deeply. It may be a better-constructed novel, but for me, at least, its catharsis is neither so immediate nor so stirring. By this I do not mean that it does not command interest. It is well worth reading even if it does not measure up to its vivid predecessor.
A. W. SMITH