It is autumn. There are not many of the old hands left. I am the
last of the seven fellows from our class.
Everyone talks of peace and armistice. All wait. If it again proves
an illusion, then they will break up; hope is high, it cannot be
taken away again without an upheaval. If there is not peace, then
there will be revolution.
I have fourteen days rest, because I have swallowed a bit of gas; in
a little garden I sit the whole day long in the sun. The armistice
is coming soon, I believe it now too. Then we will go home.
Here my thoughts stop and will not go any farther. All that meets
me, all that floods over me are but feelings--greed of life, love of
home, yearning of the blood, intoxication of deliverance. But no
aims.
Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength
of our experiences we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go
back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope.
We will not be able to find our way any more.
And men will not understand us--for the generation that grew up
before us, though it has passed these years with us here, already had
a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and
the war will be forgotten--and the generation that has grown up after
us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous
even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves,
some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;--the
years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.
But perhaps all this that I think is mere melancholy and dismay,
which will fly away as the dust, when I stand once again beneath the
poplars and listen to the rustling of their leaves. It cannot be
that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the
unknown, the perplexing, the oncoming things, the thousand faces of
the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and
divinations of women, it cannot be that this has vanished in
bombardment, in despair, in brothels.
Here the trees show gay and golden, the berries of the rowan stand
red among the leaves, country roads run white out to the sky line,
and the canteens hum like beehives with rumours of peace.
I stand up.
I am very quiet. Let the months and years come, they bring me
nothing more, they can bring me nothing more. I am so alone, and so
without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that
has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes.
Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it
will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me.
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the
whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single
sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping.
Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his
face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had
come.
CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.