Home, Boys, Home--

Home, Boys, Home--

THE ROAD BACK--Erich Maria Re- marque--Little, Brown ($2.50). No book in recent years has had so big an audience waiting for it as this one. Of Author Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front authoritative Publishers' Weekly says: "Up to date (April 4) 3,000,000 is a conservative estimate of the world sales." Without benefit of book clubs (The Road Back was not submitted to any), Erich Remarque's second novel has a long way to go to catch his first, but a long way it should go. A sequel to All Quiet, The Road Back starts just before the Armistice, carries its precociously aged heroes out of the German trenches and through the long march home, shows how the "peace" they found used them or threw them aside. Narrator is one Ernst, pre-War schoolboy, post-War veteran. The returned heroes find Peace is not what they cracked it up to be in their dugout dreams. Their families are offended at their restlessness, lack of purpose/bad table manners. One finds his four-year-deserted wife unfaithful. One cannot forget how he was buried alive in a dying man's belly, takes his memories to an asylum. One kills a man and cannot understand why not; it is what he has been taught to do. The bad soldiers become successful businessmen; vice versa. Worst of all, civil war splits the last iron band around their faithful hearts. "All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder." One old comrade is shot down in a public square by order of another. One commits suicide. Of Ernst's friends, only two get and keep a foothold. Jovial, giant Willy Homeyer is satisfied to teach a bumpkin school, stuff himself with country food. Karl Broger dives into business, rides the flood tide of inflation. Ernst too tries teaching, but his War memories are too much for him; he has a breakdown. In his convalescence he has sad but hopeful thoughts. "I will not take myself very seriously, nor push on when sometimes I should like to be still. There are many things to be built and almost everything to repair; it is enough that I work to dig out again what was buried during the years of shells and machine guns. Not everyone need be a pioneer; there is employment for feebler hands, lesser powers. It is there I mean to look for my place." So the book ends. But readers of Collier's (where The Road Back was serialized) will have had an even gloomier view into Author Remarque's mind. The story as it appeared in Collier's ended with a suicide, included another suicide missing from the present version, and contained many a dogmatically dour remark since excised. though it was too late to do anything about the version appearing in Collier's. He notified his publishers (in 21 different countries), offered to return all advances, cancel all contracts; then he left Berlin with his manuscript for parts unknown. While anxious publishers' agents searched for him, publication day (March 6 in the U. S.) came & went. In his own good time Herr Remarque reappeared, handed over an altered ending that satisfied him better. Once employed by the conservative Scherl Press (Berlin), Herr Remarque is now his own boss, has made many a million marks from his international best seller. Young (33), broodingly serious, divorced (TIME, April 14, 1930), he lives in Berlin where he likes to drive his Bugath very fast around the Avus race track, spends six months a year in Switzer-The Significance. Like All Quiet, The Road Back will startle no one by its originality. It preaches no new gospel, but expresses well what often was thought before. Both books have followed already existing types: the War novel, the postWar. But after reading The Road Back you feel as you may have felt after reading All Quiet: that the subject has now been adequately covered, that the controversy may now cease. The language in The Road Back is a little freer than in the U. S. edition of All Quiet; the publishers say it is unexpurgated. If the book comes into household usage, two of the five famed unprintable Anglo-Saxon words will be started on the climb to respectability.

The Author. Serious, conscientious Erich Maria Remarque worked hard on The Road Back, was dissatisfied with the ending and finally decided to change it, land on account of his lungs. Walter Winchell, Manhattan colyumist (Daily Mirror), did not improve his reputation for veracity when he helped circulate the rumor that Remarque's real name is Kramer (Remarque spelled backwards). Mobilized at 18, Remarque was repeatedly wounded on the Western Front. The War, which maimed his hand, put an end to his ambition to become a pianist. He does not regard himself as a literary man, says both his books are autobiographical, written to get old wounding memories off his mind.

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