Three Comrades

by Erich Maria Remarque

THE SKY WAS yellow as brass, not yet hidden by the smoke from the chimney stacks.

With all the grace of a hippopotamus, she made her way staggering among the radiators, singing in a hollow voice as she went “the Song of the Bold Hussar.”

“Man is human, Herr Lohkamp, after all.… I only smelled it at first … and then I took just one little nip, because—well, you know, I always have had a weak stomach … and then … then I think the Devil must have got hold of me. Anyway, you have no right to lead an old woman into temptation, leaving good bottles standing about like that.…”

“One must take the good as it comes. Even though one doesn’t understand.

We intended to celebrate. But we never got so far, for early that morning the English bombardment began. Köster was wounded about midday; Meyer and Deters were killed during the afternoon.

At one time I was earning as much as two hundred billion marks a month. We used to be paid twice a day, each payment followed by a half-hour’s leave, so that one could dash out to the shops and buy something before next publication of the dollar exchange rate—for by that time the money would be again worth only half.

And then what? The years after that? I put down the pencil. There was no point in going over all that. Anyway, I could not remember any longer; it had been all too confused.

For every now and then things had a way of rising up suddenly out of the past and staring at one with dead eyes. It was against such times that one kept a bottle of schnapps.

Lenz maintained that Karl had an educative effect; he taught folk a proper respect for creative talent, that always lurks under an unprepossessing exterior.

Ordinarily he could woo like a turkey cock—but now he just stood like a Carmelite monk on leave and did not stir.

“I’ve no wish to learn anything any more,” said I.

Time seemed to have ceased to flow—it was no longer a river that came from the darkness and passed out into darkness again—it was a lake in which life was noiselessly mirrored.

That is a remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.

Keep things at arm’s length, Köster used to say. If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

A modest, conscientious clerk. But they are just the ones who fare worst to-day. They have probably always fared worst. Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Forget is the word to-day, not brood.”

“In times of realism be romantic, that’s the trick.

“Rules have to be broken, or the observance gives no pleasure,” explained Lenz, filling a glass.

“Too young,” said she. “What a thing to say! It seems to me one is never too young. Only always too old.”

“Rum,” said I,—happy to have found something I could talk about,—“rum has very little to do with taste. It isn’t just a simple drink—it is a friend, more. A friend who makes everything easier. It changes the world. And so one drinks it, of course—”

The walls of the bar receded and suddenly it was no longer the bar—it was a little corner of the world, a haven of refuge, a dugout around which the eternal battle of chaos was raging and in which we two sat sheltering, mysteriously drifted to one another through the twilight of time.

Outside the muffled roar of the street poured on, punctuated with the vulture cries of motorcars. They screamed in whenever anyone opened the door. They screamed like a nagging, jealous old woman.

She could think what she liked for all of me, I didn’t care—who was she anyway? The whole show could go to the devil for all I cared, too—what was done, was done. There was nothing more to be done about it. And just as well, probably.… I went back to the bar and this time got drunk properly.

Atmosphere, aura, radiance, warmth, mystery—it’s what gives beauty a soul and makes it alive.

He knew all about her but he did not mind. And he would not have to worry for the future; when one of these girls does marry, she is to be trusted. They know the rough-and-tumble and have had enough of it.

“Oh, come, Bob!” Rosa looked at me so reproachfully that I immediately explained I knew, of course, what they were: lace covers, crocheted furniture ornaments, the symbol of little bourgeois respectability, the sacred symbol of married love and paradise lost.

They were none of them prostitutes by temperament; they were the wreckage of middle class existence. Their secret ambition was not vice, it was the marriage bed. But they would never have admitted it.

“Fine. Then you’ll be able to tell me: in love does one always behave like a damned fool?”

“Mark this one thing, my boy: never, never, never can a man make himself ridiculous in the eyes of a woman by anything he may do on her account. Not even by the most childish performances. Do anything you like—stand on your head, talk the most utter twaddle, swank like a peacock, sing under her window—anything at all but one thing: don’t be matter-of-fact. Don’t be sensible.”

“It’s extraordinary,” said Lenz after a while, “the way men put up monuments to every conceivable sort of person—why not occasionally to the moon or to a tree in blossom?”

“Poor worm,” said I, “little does he guess what is ahead of him. What sort of war had he arrived just in time for, I wonder.”

It is no use quarrelling with excited maternal instincts. They have the moral support of the entire world behind them.

“The pillars of human society are covetousness, fear, and corruption,” retorted Grau.

A certain simplicity is necessary for love. You have it. Keep it. It is a gift of God. Never to be gotten again once it is lost.”

“It’s no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.”

“Expression always eases the soul.”

Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts. In difficult times simplicity is the most priceless gift—a magic cloak that conceals dangers into which the super-intelligent run headlong as if hypnotized.”

The less a man knows the simpler it is to live. Knowledge maketh free—but unhappy.

“Well, pros’t!” said he. “May our children have rich parents.”

“Gas!” I called. “Gas! Step on it hard. We must go proudly and swiftly by. Boldness is the best rule against the law.”

I let her go—but something in me did not let her go. Long after we had come out I still felt her shoulder in my arm, the soft hair, the faint peach smell of her skin.

The smith took us aside a moment. “Look here,” said he, “if you ever have anyone you want socked—I live in Leibnitzstrasse sixteen, rear court, second staircase on the left. If it’s more, then I’ll come with my gang.”

Prices lose much of their abstract terror when one can show something for them.

To a woman flattery is not flattery. It is a compliment, which unfortunately in these miserable days has become all too rare. A woman is not a piece of steel furniture; she is a flower—she does not ask for reality; she wants the warm, gay sun of flattery. It is better to say something pretty to her every day, than to slave grimly for her all your life.

She made no complaints against life and knew that one must make the best of it if one is to get even a little bit of what is called happiness. She knew too that one must pay for it twice and three times over. Happiness is the most uncertain thing in the world and has the highest price.

“It’s not a crime to go crazy at any time.”

What do you children understand of existence? You’re afraid even of your own feelings. You don’t write letters—you telephone; you don’t dream—you go for week-end excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics—a pitiable race.”

Do you know how one knows a cavalier when one sees him? He always behaves decently when he is drunk.

The mist drifted and drifted. The crosses of the gravestones stood pale above the billows, I wrapped my coat about us. The city had completely foundered. Time was dead.

But the wicked triumphed. “My name, I will not tell it,”—from a dozen lusty throats came the ringing counterblast,—“for I am a girl off the street.…”