Explore "Road Back" by Erich Maria Remarque on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The orders regulating the attendance at school of the returned soldiers have arrived. Our delegates have achieved what we wanted-a shortened course, a separate syllabus, for the soldiers and an easing of the examination requirements.
It was no simple mater to put through, despite the Revolution; all this commotion has been nothing but a mere rippling of the surface. It has not gone under. What is the good of merely changing the occupants of a half a dozen of the top posts? Any soldier knows that a company commander may have the best of intentions, but if his non-coms, are against him, he is powerless to effect anything. So too, even the most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.