The Road Back

• Author: Erich Maria Remarque
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Publication Date: May 1, 2019
• Publisher: Recorded Books
• Series: All Quiet on the Western Front #2

The sequel to the masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front, The Road Back is a classic novel of the slow return of peace to Europe in the years following World War I.

After four grueling years, the Great War has finally ended. Now Ernst and the few men left from his company cannot help wondering what will become of them. The town they departed as eager young men seems colder, their homes smaller, the reasons their comrades had to die even more inexplicable.

For Ernst and his friends, the road back to peace is more treacherous than they ever imagined. Suffering food shortages, political unrest, and a broken heart, Ernst undergoes a crisis that teaches him what there is to live for—and what he has that no one can ever take away.

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of those books that just hang around, not even paying rent for the space it is occupying in my brain. It was on my TBR list forever, and with a new translation, something wouldn’t let me pass up a copy of this newly translated story. 

Although I read a hard copy of the first book, this one I read as an audiobook, narrated by Graham Halstead. I was surprised to realize how different the experience was when an older translated copy is used, and while I’m always impressed by anyone who has the ability to translate a book in one language completely to another, I found myself preferring the Maria Tatar translated book to this one, translated much earlier by A.W. Wheen. Either way, Halstead did a fantastic job, aside from my own lack of attention to the difference in German. For example—the older members of my family speak fluent Yiddish, which is fairly close to German, so I understand the basics. However, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that when Halstead referred to the character ‘Villy’ he was using the German pronunciation for ‘Willy,” since the German ‘w’ is pronounced as a ‘v.’

Despite that snag, I found this book to be as intriguing as the last one, despite the fact that this book focused on an entirely different group of soldiers who were in the same company, which was basically decimated. At first, I didn’t see how things would connect, but I did find Ernst to be an easy to like character and was curious about what would happen to Ernst and his friends. Rather than focusing on their military experiences, this book explores the dramatic shift these young men have as they return home and have to adjust to civilian life. Nowadays, there is a lot of awareness of PTSD and some highly effective treatments, while in WWI it wasn’t well understood and sometimes referred to as shell shock, and there was no treatment to help them deal with the trauma they faced day and night while on the front lines. 

The book is titled perfectly, as we follow along with this tattered crew of survivors. Some of them have suffered severe injuries and amputations, but there has been little attention to their mental health. In today’s society, there are ways to connect veterans to resources for physical and mental health concerns, although this wasn’t done in WWI. These men were told to return to their normal lives and were seemingly expected to do so with no issues. But these boys (sorry, I’m at an age when being 20 looks like a fetus to me) arrived home and had so much trouble integrating back into civilian society. This is evident early in the book, when the guys are so used to scavenging food that one of them returns home full of pride with a dead goose…which is his neighbors prize-winning goose. Having to return the dead goose to the owner rankled him because they all scavenged for whatever they could find to eat, especially since the war rations were certainly not enough.

Aside from having to rein in the base impulses that helped them to survive on the front lines, there is another disconnect that is so apparent throughout the story. After facing death and poison gas; having to shoot, stab, and kill Allied soldiers face to face at times; and only being responsible to their superior officers; these young men can’t reconnect to their old lives easily. It’s like they have to relearn social niceties, having the freedom to bathe regularly, not having to fear for their life and be alert at all times, but by far the biggest struggle these guys face is having to return to school. When you’re a veteran who has stared death in the eye, I can only imagine how difficult it would be to have to return to high school to finish the last year. It becomes a sticking point for them, and they struggle with being forced to learn from someone who has more knowledge from books but less life experience and skills. 

Overall, this is a powerful book focusing on the guys who became known as ‘the lost generation’ who were exposed to hugely traumatic events for years, and returned to lives they couldn’t easily slip back into. Instead they didn’t return from war with any marketable skills and their unaddressed mental health needs was another struggle. Of the men in this company, each of them are scarred in their own ways—some have had limbs amputated, all are used to being stuck in the trenches, and haunted by the men they had to kill. Once they get home, they find their rooms, families, and hometown to be too small for them now, and it’s an uncomfortable fit. I really liked how the men stuck together and remained supportive of each other in any way they could, and while it is very different from the front line conditions, they’re still brothers in arms after the war is over. This was a really interesting book, particularly since I grew up with someone who struggled with severe PTSD as a result of witnessing and experiencing wartime trauma during the Holocaust. 

Bottom line: Not an easy read, but worth the trouble. If you’ve ever wondered what happened to those young men that survived the trenches of WWI, this book will help you understand the road back to their old lives.

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