The Road Back

Erich Maria Remarque's novel follows a group of German soldiers as they return home from the trenches of World War I and struggle to rebuild their lives in a society that no longer understands them.

The story opens in November 1918, in the war's final days. Ernst Birkholz, the narrator, huddles in a battered trench with the remnants of his platoon. His closest comrades include Adolf Bethke, a cobbler who has protected Ernst since he arrived as a raw recruit; Ludwig Breyer, Ernst's former schoolmate and the platoon's lieutenant; Ferdinand Kosole, a gruff veteran; Willy Homeyer, a towering, red-haired soldier; and Heinrich Wessling, a farmer. During a night attack, Wessling's belly is torn open. At a dressing station, the doctor cannot operate in time. Wessling asks Ernst to deliver his belongings to his wife, then dies gazing at the peaceful autumn countryside. The next morning, the men occupy the front trenches for the last time. They name their many dead comrades and march out, gripped by relief and wrenching grief in equal measure.

On the road home, the company encounters well-equipped American troops, revealing the hopeless material odds they fought against. Max Weil, the company's stretcher bearer, announces that revolution has broken out in Berlin and the Kaiser has fled to Holland. Lieutenant Heel, the company's fearless commander, removes his shoulder straps and dons a private's tunic. The soldiers feel betrayed: The leader for whom their comrades died has run away.

At a barracks square, the company assembles for the last time. Only 32 men remain out of more than 500. Heel tries to deliver a farewell speech but cannot finish. Ernst, Ludwig, Willy, Albert Trosske (another schoolmate), Karl Bröger (also a schoolmate), Kosole, Tjaden (a fellow soldier), Valentin Laher (a fellow soldier and former circus acrobat), and others board a chaotic, overcrowded train. Bethke departs at a village stop, a solitary figure walking toward home across the dark plain.

In their hometown, soldiers wearing revolutionary red armbands attack Ludwig for his officer's shoulder straps, and two sailors trample him. Willy arrives and beats the attackers senseless. A one-armed sergeant defuses the confrontation by saluting Ludwig as a fellow front-line soldier.

Ernst's family has hung a welcome banner, but he cannot listen to their talk of ration shortages. His room seems smaller than he remembered. Visiting Albert, he meets Albert's brother Hans, who has lost both feet to frostbite. Albert feels guilty for being whole. Ernst and his friends join a revolutionary procession that stalls after a few speeches. The revolution amounts to nothing. Alone afterward, Ernst peers through a window at a woman playing piano in a warm room, longing for a sheltered world he cannot enter.

The soldiers return to the Teachers' College for a shortened course. The principal celebrates heroism and the "glorious death of arms." Willy explodes, describing how a comrade died with his intestines spilling out. Ludwig delivers a measured rebuke: Their dead comrades died for something no speech can capture. When Ernst visits Bethke, he learns that Adolf's wife Marie had an affair during the war. Adolf sent her away but endured unbearable loneliness. She returns each day, sitting in silence, but Adolf cannot forgive or move on.

Ernst visits a former classmate named Giesecke in a psychiatric facility. Giesecke was buried alive at the Battle of Fleury with his face pressed against another man's wounds. He appears lucid by day, but every night the suffocating visions return. On the walk home, Ludwig says they all have a touch of what afflicts Giesecke. At the brook where he played as a boy, Ernst meets Georg Rahe, a former schoolmate and ex-airman, who confides he plans to become a soldier again. Later, at Ludwig's apartment, Georg announces he is leaving. Ludwig erupts, arguing that the soldiers were duped into slaughtering one another for industrialists and diplomats. Georg counters that peacetime has become a war of every man for himself. Ludwig insists he will stay and rebuild. Georg departs at dawn without looking back.

Karl sells his beloved book collection to fund a schnapps business. The group scrounges for food in the countryside, overpowering police officers who try to confiscate their provisions. At a dance hall, Ernst encounters Adele, a girl he admired before the war, and realizes she has changed. The war has severed his connection to his youth. At a regimental reunion, old comradeship dissolves as men sort themselves by civilian status.

Ernst takes a teaching position in a rural village but has terrifying nightmares in which dead men he killed pursue him. Looking at his young students, he feels polluted and guilty, with nothing to offer but knowledge of killing. He quits. Back in town, a blood test confirms Ludwig has syphilis, contracted at a wartime brothel. Ludwig tries to withdraw from human contact, but Ernst embraces him and refuses to let him pull away.

Political violence escalates. A procession of wounded veterans marches through the streets; one man, a torso on a handcart, carries a placard reading "I should like to walk too, mate." That evening, Heel, now commanding government troops, occupies the Town Hall with a machine gun. Weil walks alone into the square, pleading with the soldiers not to shoot. Heel orders fire. Weil falls dead. Ludwig retrieves the body and tells Heel the dead man is their former comrade. Heel shows no remorse.

Bethke, driven from his village by gossip about Marie's infidelity, sells his house and moves to a dark apartment in town. He drinks and broods. Ernst finds him in a pub and reflects that the best soldier has been destroyed by peace.

At a profiteers' nightclub, Albert discovers his girlfriend with Julius Bartscher, a wealthy war profiteer. Bartscher insults him. Albert draws his field revolver and shoots Bartscher dead. The soldier trained to kill without hesitation still lives inside the gentle Albert.

Ludwig confides that he rekindled a romance but realized his syphilis makes intimacy impossible. That night, he locks his door and cuts an artery. Ernst spirals into a breakdown, hallucinating dead comrades filing into his room. He runs screaming into the street and collapses into a prolonged illness.

After a long convalescence tended by his mother, Ernst lies in a summer meadow and experiences a moment of transcendent peace. Georg reappears, haggard and shaken, having quit a paramilitary Free Corps unit after witnessing comrades murdered by their own side. At Albert's trial, Ernst and Willy argue that the war made Albert a killer and society failed returning soldiers. Albert receives three years in prison. Georg crosses the frontier to the old battlefields. Standing before rows of graves in the moonlight, he grasps the full enormity of a generation's destruction and shoots himself.

In the epilogue, Ernst, Willy, Kosole, and Valentin walk in the spring countryside. They encounter teenage boys in quasi-military uniforms practicing war maneuvers. Willy confronts them, outraged that children are being militarized so soon after the war. A flock of wild geese flies overhead, echoing the novel's opening, and the men fall silent. Alone in a country inn that night, Ernst resolves to work on himself quietly, to dig out what the war buried. He accepts he may never be truly happy, but something will always sustain him. Outside, spring buds are bursting. Ernst chooses to begin.