The Road Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

and gives Tjaden a kick. We sneak off embarrassed.
    Next morning we hear that a major in one of the neighbouring regiments shot himself when he learned of the flight of the Emperor.
    Heel is coming. He is grey and worn with sleeplessness. Quietly he gives the necessary instructions. Then he goes again. And we all feel just terrible. The last thing that was left to us has been taken away—the very ground cut from under our feet.
    "It's betrayed, well and truly betrayed, that's what we are," says Kosole grumpily.
    Very different from yesterday is the column that lines up today and marches dismally off—a lost company, an abandoned army. The entrenching tool claps with every step—monotonous melody—in vain—in vain——
    Only Ledderhose is as happy as a lark. He sells us tinned meat and sugar out of his American plunder.
    Next evening we reach Germany. Now that French is no longer spoken everywhere around us, we begin at last to believe that the peace is real. Until now we have been secretly expecting an order to turn about and go back to the trenches—a soldier is mistrustful of good, it is better to expect the contrary from the outset. But now a bubbling ferment begins slowly to work in us.
    We enter a large village. A few bedraggled garlands hang across the street. So many troops have passed through already that it is not worth while to make any special fuss about us, the last of them, So we must content ourselves with the faded welcome of a few rain-sodden placards loosely looped round with oak leaves cut out of green paper. The people hardly so much as look at us as we march by, so accustomed have they grown to it. But for us it is a new thing to come here and we hunger for a few friendly looks, however much we may pretend we do not give a damn. The girls at least might stop and wave to us. Every now and then Tjaden and Jupp try to attract the attention of one, but without success. We look too grisly, no doubt. So in the end they give it up.
    Only the children accompany us. We take them by the hand and they run along beside us. We give them all the chocolate we can spare—we want, of course, to take some small part of it home. Adolf Bethke has taken a little girl up in his arms. She tugs at his beard as if it were a bridle, and laughs with glee to see his grimaces. The little hands pat his face. He catches hold of one of them to show me how tiny it is.
    The child begins to cry now that he is pulling no more faces. Adolf tries to pacify her, but she only cries the more loudly and he has to put her down.
    "We seem to have turned into first-rate bogeymen," growls Kosole.
    "Who wouldn't be scared of such a prize front-line phiz," Willy explains to him, "it must just give them the creeps."
    "We smell of blood, that's what it is," says Ludwig Breyer wearily.
    "Well, we must have a jolly good bath," replies Jupp, "and perhaps that will make the girls a bit keener too."
    "Yes, if bathing were all there is to it," answers Ludwig pensively.
    Listlessly we trudge onward. We had pictured our entry into our own country after the long years out there rather differently from this. We imagined that people would be waiting for us, expecting us; now we see that already everyone is taken up with his own affairs. Life has moved on, is still moving on; it is leaving us behind, almost as if we were superfluous already. The village, of course, is not Germany; all the same the disappointment sticks in our gizzard, and a shadow passes over us and a queer foreboding.
    Carts rattle past, drivers shout, men look up as they pass, then fall again to their own thoughts and cares. The hour is pealing from the church tower; the damp wind sniffs us as it goes by. Only an old woman with long bonnet strings is running indefatigably along the column, and in a tremulous voice is asking for a certain Erhard Schmidt.
    We are billeted in a large outhouse. Though we have marched a long way no one wants to rest. We go off to the inn.
    Here is life in plenty,