Explore "Road Back" by Erich Maria Remarque on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I am on my way from the station to visit Adolf Bethke. I know this house at once-he has described it to me so often out there.
A garden with fruit trees. The apples have not all been picked yet. There are a lot lying in the grass under the trees. On an open space before the door is an immense chestnut tree and the ground beneath it is covered over and over with russet leaves, the stone table below and the bench also. The pinkish white of the burst, spikey husks, the lustrous brown of the fallen nuts gleams among the leaves. I take up one or two and look at the lacquered, veined, mahogany rind and the lighter coloured, germinal spot underneath. To think such things exist! I look about me-To think that there is still all this-these gay trees! blue, misty woods-yes, woods, not mere shattered tree-stumps; and this wind over the fields, without fume of powder or stink of gas; this greasy, glistening, ploughed earth with its pungent smell; horses pulling ploughs, not gun-limbers now; and following behind them, without rifles, the ploughmen, home again, ploughmen in soldiers' uniforms.