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Completed	18 September 2007
Title	The Road Back
Author	Erich Maria Remarque
Published	1931
Quote	"Roads stretch far through the landscape, the villages lie in a grey light; trees rustle, leaves are falling, falling. Along the road, step upon step, in their faded, dirty uniforms tramp the grey columns. The unshaved faces beneath the steel helmets are haggard, wasted with hunger and long peril, pinched and dwindled to the lines drawn by terror and courage and death. They trudge along in silence; silently, as they have now marched over so many roads, have sat in so many trucks, squatted in so many dugouts, crouched in so many shell-holes---without many words; so too they now trudge along this road back home into peace. Without many words. Old men with beards and slim lads scarce twenty years of age, comrades without difference. Beside them their lieutenants, little more than children, yet the leaders of many a night raid. And behind them, the army of slain. Thus they tramp onward, step by step, sick, half-starving, without ammunition, in thin companies, with eyes that still fail to comprehend it; escaped out of that underworld, on the road back into life."
Review	What an awesome book. I loved every minute of it. I give this book two ebony wooden knitting needles up. This book is the sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front and it describes what happens to the German boys once the war ends; how they make their way back into the world; how they fit and how they don't. There's something about the way the author writes. I just love it. He can describe a ghastly scene and make it sound poetic. For instance, let's look at the following passage where he describes a soldier caught in the barbed wire in No Mans Land. This concept of being "stranded" in No Mans Land is frequent in war literature, and here it's described like I've never read before: "All day long he lay out in the wire screaming, and his guts hanging out of his belly like macaroni. Then a bit of shell took off his fingers and a couple of hours later another chunk off his leg; and still he lived; and with his other hand he would keep trying to pack back his intestines, and when night fell at last he was done. And when it was dark we went out to get him and he was full of holes as a nutmeg grater." Do you agree that's an amazing passage? Now I know it's gruesome. Duh. But can you look past that and appreciate the poetry? Gosh, I wish I could write like that. Let me indulge in another passage. It's amazing how well he describes warfare; when I read it, I feel as though I'm really there. And that's ultimately the goal of a writer, isn't it, to transport you. "It grows dark. The fire catches us. There is practically no cover. With hands and spades we scoop holes for our heads in the crater. And so we lie, pressed close to the ground, Albert and Bethke beside me. A shell lands not twenty yards from us. As the beast comes on screaming, we open wide our mouths to save our ear-drums; even so we are half deafened, and our eyes filled with dirt and muck, and in our noses the foul stench of powder and sulphur. It rains metal. Somebody has stopped one; for along with a smoking shell fragment there lands in our crater by Bethke's head a severed hand."

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