Johann Bogdan served eight months on the Russian front. Seventeen surgeries and one eye later, the wife of his oldest neighbor takes his train ticket without knowing his face. What follows is a walk up a single dusty road toward a homecoming his body remembers how to survive but his heart no longer can.

Andreas Latzko wrote Heimkehr in a Swiss sanatorium in 1917, in two months, while recovering from combat trauma on the Isonzo front. It was praised by Karl Kraus, prefaced in French by Romain Rolland, translated into nineteen languages before the war ended, and banned by every combatant government. The Nazis burned it. It has been out of English print for most of a century.

A hundred and nine years later, the story reads as if it were written this morning. American veterans have been coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan for a generation, disfigured by burn pits and blast concussions, walking into towns that do not know their faces. The men who profited from those wars are still in Washington and still speaking about the fatherland. The women who waited found that the war had followed the men home. Latzko wrote all of this in 1917 and named it. He also named the thing that comes next—what happens when the technique a soldier learned to use on strangers stops staying at the front.