Erich Maria Remarque: War’s conqueror worms

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

German writers on peace and war

Erich Maria Remarque: Selections on war

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Erich Maria Remarque
From A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1954)
Translated by Denver Lindley

He had returned along the road through the village. Planks and boards had been thrown across the streets to make it possible to cross the melted snow. The planks shifted as he walked over them and it was easy to slip off; there was no longer anything firm underneath.

He went past the church. It was little and bullet-scarred and Lieutenant Reicke was lying inside it. The door stood open. The evening before two dead soldiers had been found, and Rahe had ordered that all three be given a military burial next morning. One of the soldiers, a lance corporal, could not be identified. His face had been eaten away and he had no identification marks. His stomach, too, had been torn open and the liver was missing. Foxes, very likely, or rats. How they had got at him was a puzzle.

Graeber went into the church. It smelled of saltpeter, decay, and the dead. He threw the beam of his flashlight into the corners. In one of them stood two broken images. A couple of torn potato sacks beside them showed that under the Soviets the room had been used to store vegetables. Nearby a rusty bicycle without chain or tires stood in the snow that had drifted in. In the middle of the room lay the dead on strips of canvas. They lay there severe and aloof and alone, and nothing mattered to them anymore.

Graeber closed the door and went on around the village; shadows hovered about the ruins and even the feeble light seemed traitorous. He climbed the rise on which the graves had been dug. The one for Reicke had been widened so that the two dead soldiers could be buried with him. He heard the low sound of water trickling into the hole. The earth that had been shoveled out shimmered dully. A cross with the names on it leaned there. Anyone who wanted to could, for a couple of days, find out from it who lay there. Not for longer – the village would soon be a battlefield again.

From the rise Graeber looked out across the land. It was barren and dreary and treacherous; the light magnified and obscured, and nothing was familiar. Everything was foreign and penetrated by the chill loneliness of the unknown. There was nothing that one could rely on; nothing that offered warmth. Everything was as endless as the land. Without boundaries and alien. Alien outside and in. That was it. That was what had become of him.

A clump of earth freed itself from the pile and he heard it fall with a thud into the hole. In this hard-frozen earth had the worms survived? Perhaps – if they had burrowed deep enough. But could they live five yards deep? And what did they find there to live on? From tomorrow on they would have plenty if they were still there.

They had found enough in recent years, he thought. Everywhere we have gone they have been able to feed on superabundance. For the worms of Europe, Asia and Africa we have been the Golden Age. We have turned over to them armies of corpses. Not only soldiers’ flesh – women’s flesh, too, and children’s flesh and the soft bomb-torn flesh of the aged. Plenty of all. In the sagas of the worms we will be for generations the kindly gods of superfluity.

He turned away. The dead – there had been too many. At first the others; principally the others – but then death had encroached more and more upon their own ranks. The regiments had constantly to be re-formed; of the comrades who had been there at the beginning more and more had disappeared, and now they were just a handful. Of the friends he had had there was only one left – Fresenburg, commander of the fourth company. The others were dead or transferred or in the hospital or in Germany unfit for service, if they had been lucky. All that had once looked different. And it had been called by a different name, too.

He heard Sauer’s step and saw him climbing toward him.

“Nothing. I thought for a moment I heard something. But it was only the rats in the paddock where the dead Russians are.”

Sauer glanced at the mound under which the guerrillas had been buried. “They at least got a grave.”

“Yes. They had to dig it themselves, though.”

Sauer spat. “You can really understand the poor beasts. After all, it’s their land we’re ruining.”

Graeber looked at him. By night one had different thoughts than by day, but Sauer was an old soldier and not excessively emotional. “How did you hit on that?” he asked. “Because we’re retreating?”

“Of course. Just imagine their doing the same thing to us some day!”

Graeber was silent for a while. I’m no better than he is, he thought. I too kept pushing the idea away as long as I could. “It’s funny how you begin to understand others when you get your own ass in a sling,” he said then. “As long as everything’s fine you just don’t think about it.”

“Of course not. Everyone knows that.”

“Yes, but it’s not much of a testimonial, is it?”

“Testimonial? Who cares about a testimonial when his own neck’s at stake?” Sauer looked at Graeber with a mixture of amazement and irritation. “The things you educated fellows keep thinking up! We two didn’t start the war and we’re not responsible for it. We’re only doing our duty. And orders are orders. Aren’t they?”

“Yes,” Graeber replied wearily.