Sherry Chandler » Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death from shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever.
Earth!—Earth!—Earth!
Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the haling of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-born life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!
At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years.
—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, trans. A. W. Wheen (Fawcett Crest paperback 1975)
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2 Comments
1. Georgia Green Stamper replies at 28th May 2007, 1:14 pm :
Thank you for this, Sherry. I’ve not read _All Quiet On the Western Front_ since my college days, but the prose here is as powerful as I remembered it to be. On Saturday, I stood at the graves of my two great-uncles, Murphy and Ditzler Hudson, and studied the military markers that commemorate their service in WWI. I’m pretty sure neither of them ever read Remarque - they were Kentucky farmers with limited education - and my memories of Uncle Ditzler are dim. Uncle Murf, however, lived long into my adulthood. I can still recall the disbelief in his voice as he told me they were commanded to put gas masks on their battlefield horses before themselves.
Uncle Murf ended up being “gassed” and his health so compromised that he was discharged with a military disability pension and sent home to die. Being a stubborn Hudson, however, he fought to live. After a lengthy, near-death sojourn, he got up and began to lead an active life — which he did until his death at age 96. It is my understanding that he drew the modest military disability pension until the end, an irony that tickles me.
In this morning’s Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, there were photographs of each Kentuckian who has died in the Iraq War. I found myself studying the faces in each picture, reading the information posted beneath each. I was struck by how beautiful they all were. I thought about how not much has changed “in one part of our being, a thousand years.”
2. sherry replies at 30th May 2007, 9:37 am :
A belated thank-you, Georgia, for this reminiscence. It brought a tear to my eye.
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