The Forgotten Soldier

“A twin-mounted machine gun covered the rest of the train, which consisted simply of open flatcars like ours, but loaded with a very different kind of freight. The first one of these to pass my uncomprehending eyes seemed to be carrying a confused heap of objects, which only gradually became recognizable as human bodies. Directly behind this heap other people were clinging together, crouching or standing. Each car was full to the bursting point. One of us, more informed than the others, told us in two words what we were looking at: ‘Russian prisoners.’”

Before he sees anything kind of combat, Sajer earns an introduction to other kinds of horrors that war brings forth. He will soon enough learn the bitterness of the Russian cold, and here he sees that it does not spare its own countrymen, while the survivors pile up bodies in a desperate effort to block out the wind and snow. It is a small snippet of the massive cruelties on which he will gain a greater perspective as he progresses.

“If for some the fall of Stalingrad was a staggering blow, for others, it provoked a spirit of revenge which rekindled faltering spirits. In our group, given the wide range of ages, opinion was divided. The older men were, generally speaking, defeatist, while the younger ones were determined to liberate their comrades.”

After months of cheerful assurances that victory was on the horizon, Sajer and his comrades receive the crushing news that the mighty Sixth Army has surrendered and that an entire theater on the massive Soviet front has collapsed. The generational divide Sajer describes is a familiar one in wartime, where the enthusiasm of youth fires up at the sight of the most difficult obstacles, while those with more experience understand that harsh realities are not moved by willpower alone.

“Children…he wasn’t far wrong: we seemed like children beside these Don veterans. A few rounds from the big guns had seemed to us like the end of the world. There was a great difference between the proud soldiers we’d been in Poland, marching smartly through the villages with our guns slung, and where we were now. How many times in the past I had thought myself invulnerable, filled with the pride we all felt […] but here, by the banks of the Don, we seemed like nothing, like bundles of rags which each sheltered a small, trembling creature.”

The book very much works as a coming of age narrative, and before the still very young Sajer can go from boy to man, he must understand just how boyish he is. While he has seen war and experienced privation, those on the front have dealt with horrors far beyond what he could comprehend during his days of swaggering hundreds of miles from any real action. This breakdown of his sense of self is what begins his evolution into a more mature and capable soldier.

“By the time I belonged to the Victorious Allies, who were all heroes, like every French soldier I met after the war. Only victors have stories to tell. We, the vanquished, were all cowards and weaklings by then, whose memories, fears, and enthusiasms should not be remembered.”

One is generally not inclined to give sympathy to the member of an army that served under the rule of the Nazi party, often collaborating in its most notorious atrocities and tyrannical rule. Yet Sajer does speak to a certain truth, that the losers of war are defined by having lost, and become painted in the colors that history finds appropriate. There is thus a value in recovering a more three-dimensional portrait of what it meant to be a German soldier, without excusing the many evils with which he and others were associated.

“We had not been given any more food, but then a soldier of the Reich was supposed to be able to withstand cold, heat, rain, suffering, hunger and fear. Our stomachs growled, and the blood beat in our temples and at our smallest joints. But the air and the earth and the universe were growling too. From habit, we were almost able to persuade ourselves that this was a possible way to live. I know of many who actually managed it.”

This passage speaks to the theme of Comradeship Among Soldiers. During mobilization, Sajer is told that the German soldier must be capable of total sacrifice on behalf of the greater good. Toward the front, he endures these difficulties not out of an abundance of patriotism, but utter necessity, as the alternative is to fall down and die. If there is anything motivating him not to do that, other than the sheer will to survive, it is the bond with his fellow soldiers.

“I volunteered for service in the motorized infantry. We were fed up with digging and acting as maidservants to the rest of the army. The decision almost cost us our lives many times, but even now, looking back on everything that happened, I cannot regret having belonged to a combat unit. We discovered a sense of comradeship which I have never found again, inexplicable and steady, through thick and thin.”

This passage also addresses Comradeship Among Soldiers. By the end of the first part of the book, Sajer has made a major transition from uniformed child to experienced soldier, but he has still enjoyed an auxiliary role, ferrying supplies and standing guard duty over depots. As hard as it has been to watch his friends die and fear for his own death, his sense of fellowship is inspiring him toward a desire for martial heroics, even as the prospects of winning the war continue to dim.

“Every prisoner caught robbing a German body was immediately shot. There were no official firing squads for these executions. An officer would simply shoot the offender on the spot, or hand him over to a couple of toughs who were regularly given this sort of job. Once, to my horror, I saw one of these thugs tying the hands of three prisoners to the bars of the gate. When his victims had been secured, he stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats, pulled the pin, and ran for shelter. The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment.”

Sajer does not go into extensive details on the most horrifying aspects of the German campaign in the East, which was also the primary setting for the Holocaust. Here, in one of the most gruesome passages, we see the casual cruelty and dehumanization that often takes hold in environments where life is cheap and moral standards give way to brute instinct.

“There was no reason, either, for me to be walking along that clean, well-organized street in a state of disarray, and no reason for anyone to be patient with a poor, befuddled soldier, just because he’d spent months wallowing in snow and mud and horror. People at peace with themselves have no idea that anyone unaccustomed to happiness shouts himself breathless in the face of joy. I was the one who had to try to understand, to adapt myself to this mood of tranquility, to avoid shocking anyone, to smile a correct smile, neither too wide nor too tense.”

Returning from combat, Sajer has extraordinary difficulty adjusting to civilian life. With his fellow soldiers, he often talks of home and its comforts, but when he gets the chance to enjoy those comforts, he struggles to shake the anxieties and privations of the front. Sajer has developed such an entirely new sense of normal in Russia that the normal of Berlin forces him into a conscious adjustment to the absence of horror.

“Now we knew. We were going to be part of a full-scale attack. A heavy sense of foreboding settled over us, and the knowledge that soon some of us would be dead stamped on every face […] In fact, none of us could imagine his own death. Some would be killed—we all knew that—but each one imagined himself doing the burying. No one, despite the obvious danger, could think of himself lying mortally wounded. That was something which happened to other people—thousands of them—but never to oneself.”

Sajer’s attitude toward death changes often over the course of his experiences. By this point, he has been to the front and seen death firsthand, but now as the member of a combat unit, he is going to be the kind of person he admired from a distance while still working supply. Participating in an attack means that he is not just risking death, but facing it head-on. Refusing to believe he can die is one of many coping mechanisms he will develop to manage an otherwise all-consuming fear.

“We tried to blot out of the memory of the Russian trench we had machine gunned, and the tanks driving heavily over that moving mass of human flesh, and Deptréoka, with its piles of Bolshevik corpses, and the hammering of enemy artillery in the narrow streets crammed with Hitlerjugend—all the appalling, incredible details. We suddenly felt gripped by something horrible, which made our skins crawl and our hair stand on end. For me, these memories produced a loss of physical sensation, almost as if my personality had split. I knew that I was actually incapable of such experiences—not because I was superior to other people, but because I knew that such things don’t happen to young men who have led normal lives more or less like other people’s.”

Psychologists talk about a process called disassociation, where a person can rationalize or even phase out things they have done which contradict the core of their own self-understanding. Sajer is not a novice to combat when he has this experience. It is because he has seen so much, to the point where everything else seems like a distant memory, that he desperately clings to a former sense of himself lest this harsh new reality become the whole of his being.

“The veteran […] knew how the Russians operated, and had already done a lot of fighting. He told us we would have a lull—but he was wrong. The Russian units had grown enormously, and were no longer the crippled divisions which had been shoved out of Poland by the Wehrmacht, and on into Russia for hundreds of miles. Times had changed.”

For the vast majority of the book, Sajer describes the Red Army as an inhuman mass, an unstoppable force without hesitation or pity. But here he briefly notes, as historians affirm, that the Red Army won because it changed its strategy from trying to defend every scrap of territory with no regard to costs, to letting German inferiority in supply and manpower ultimately do them in.

“‘Germany is a great county,’ he used to tell us, ‘Today, our difficulties are immense. The system in which we more or less believe is every bit as good as the slogans on the other side. Even if we don’t always approve of what we have to do, we must carry out orders for the sake of our country, our comrades and our families, against whom the other half of the world is fighting in the name of truth and justice […] those exhausted societies, drained by their “liberty,” begin to bellow about their “convictions” and become a threat to us, and to peace. It’s basic wisdom to keep people like that well fed and content, if one wishes to extract even a tenth of the possible return.’”

This speech is especially jarring, given that the Nazis are rightfully considered one of the most brutal and tyrannical regimes in modern history. Yet it is important to show how even villains are able to portray themselves as heroes, acknowledging the centrality of violence in what they do, but justifying it as a cleansing process to get through the detritus of modern civilization and find the virtuous core. It is disturbing for the modern reader, especially given that the timing of this speech coincides with the peak of the Holocaust, but it shows how ordinary people can fall for reprehensible ideologies.

“It’s strange how often human beings die without any kind of style. Two years before I had seen a woman run over by a milk truck, and had nearly fainted at the sight of her mangled body. Now, after years in Russia, visible death meant nothing at all, and the tragic element of even the best murder novels seemed petty and frivolous.”

The more Sajer experiences combat, the bleaker his perspective becomes. When he first sees death on the Eastern Front, he is horrified, experiencing both physical revulsion and a kind of moral protest at acts like the summary execution of prisoners. Over time, he becomes inured to the sheer volume of horrors.

“We could only wait and hope; but hope for what? To escape dying face down in the mud? And the war? All it needed as an order from the authorities, and it would end—an order, which the men would respect like a sacrament. And why? Because, after all, the men were only human […] I went on crying, and muttering incoherently to my impassive companion.”

Given everything that happens to him, it is surprising that Sajer does not spend more time complaining about the (very real) faults of the High Command, the absurdity of prosecuting a war, even trying to maintain an offensive posture long after the wisdom and plausibility of that prospect has dimmed. Sajer mostly stays away from politics, but here he wonders why the leaders do not end the war with a single word (as they ultimately did in the previous war in November 1918, with German forces still stationed in France and Belgium) rather than pursue so much meaningless suffering.

“It seemed as if the war would mark men for life. They might forget women, or money, or how to be happy, but they would never forget the war, which spoiled everything—even the joy which was bound to come, like the victory ahead. The laughter of men who have lived through war has something forced and desperate about it. It does them no good to say that they must now make use of the experience; these mechanisms have been run too hard, and something has gone out of balance. Laughter no longer has any more value for them than tears.”

As the narrative progresses, Sajer’s tone leans more and more toward nihilism. Here he concludes that there is no happiness so overwhelming that it could ever hold a permanent grip on a person’s consciousness. There is, however, in war a pain and sorrow so all-consuming that it can blot out joy.

“Peace has brought many pleasures, but nothing as powerful as that passion for survival in wartime, that faith in love, and that sense of absolutes. It often strikes me with horror that peace is really extremely monotonous. During the terrible moments of war one longs for peace with a passion that is painful to bear. But in peacetime on should never, even for an instant, long for war!”

German militarists, especially prior to World War I, would argue that war was a preferable state of affairs because it prompted the emergence of virtues like loyalty and courage, which the softness of peacetime might let decay. Sajer seems to turn this argument on its head, as war does produce an unusual font of emotion, but one that appreciates the benefits of peace rather than craving something from war itself. Peace might be boring, he says, but it is still far preferable to the excitement of war.

“Once again, the vastness of this countryside, untouched by any human life, filled us with a sense of constraint. The idea of space, the conception of immensity, could not be more perfectly expressed than by this scenery designed for giants. Could anyone possibly control this country? Could we? Could the NKVD?”

It is impossible to have an account of war in Russia without reckoning with its incredible space. Though other factors were at play, the sheer size of Russia played a major part in wearing down a German offensive ultimately based on tracks, wheels, and feet. It has become evident that the German army is not equipped to handle this space, and in this moment, Sajer wonders if the Soviet secret police could do any better.

“We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich—or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb—ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear, which was our motivating power. The idea of death, even when we accepted it, made us howl with powerless rage.”

Sajer frequently comments on how the immediacy of combat swallows up the entire outside world. In the face of death, ideology does not matter, whether one’s own or the enemy’s, and home is so alien from one’s current experiences that it defies conception. Sajer is not even talking about fighting on behalf of his fellow soldiers, a common theme in soldiers’ stories. He is simply trying to stay alive, while knowing that death could come at any second.

“We abandoned the territory to the Red waves that followed us. This was the final passage of the last European crusade—in the complete sense of the word.”

After nearly two years in Russia, Sajer’s tone is generally cynical toward the war, its ostensible purposes, and the leaders responsible for conducting it. He is mainly concerned with the safety of himself and his friends, and with coming home. Yet this brief line speaks to a last gasp of idealism, a lingering belief that the invasion really was about rescuing European civilization from the Bolshevik menace—but that ideal only comes into light after it has been decisively defeated.

“We resumed our march. The leaflets were still circulating from hand to hand, and their words and phrases ‘the war is lost,’ ‘treason,’ ‘cities destroyed’ echoed in our minds like a gloomy round. Of course, it was Communist propaganda. All we had to do was talk to the fellow who’d escaped from Tomvos to understand that. But then anyone who’d been home on leave had seen the bombed German cities. And then were was our continuous and painful retreat, and our daily existence, with its total lack of transport, gas, food, mail, everything. Perhaps the war really was lost. But that couldn’t be possible.”

Propaganda efforts are common on the front lines, and are more often than not a figure of fun for Sajer and his comrades to dismiss the absurd claims of their enemies. But after a while, more of the pieces start coming together, as soldiers on the front learn that their own experiences of defeat, withdrawal, and privation are quite common, and are not limited to the front line. What began as propaganda might ultimately approach the truth.

“Now, for the last two days, old men, women, and children had been desperately digging out the trenches, gun pits, and anti-tank ditches which were to stop the waves of enemy tanks. This pathetic and heroic effort before the infernal debacle which would sweep them into the flux of terrorized civilians was a preliminary shock for these virtuous civilians, who saw the front coming toward them in the form of exhausted, half-starved troops, tired of fighting and of living, who brushed aside human pawns without a qualm, as if they were pieces in a losing game of chess.”

The closing sections of the book describe vividly the enormous costs paid by civilians, and while there is little room for sympathy with the German cause, there is surely pity for German civilians who suffer greatly without having contributed to the atrocities of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi Party. Their halting efforts to contribute to the war effort quickly give way to the reality that not even professional and experienced soldiers will be able to stop the onslaught, and that before long there will be little left to do but flee.

“How long were we there? For how many lifetimes? It is no longer possible to say, and the world will never know. I feel now as though I was born to experience that test. Memel had become the summit of my life, the ultimate peak, with only the infinite beyond it. We felt that after Memel nothing of us would remain, and that the life we would experience in the future would be like the crutches one offers to a cripple. Memel is the tomb of my life, the absolute.”

The battle in Memel is a climactic moment in many respects. It is the last desperate attempt to hold back the Soviet tsunami, and packs all the horrors of war (including the massive inflow of refugees) into a tight space. It also pushes Sajer even further beyond what he thought was possible. Everything afterward in his life is just an epilogue.

“The West was the other half of the vise tightening on our misery. Several armies were challenging our exhausted arms—several, among them the French army. I cannot describe the emotions which this news produced in me. France, which in my thoughts had never abandoned me, ‘la douce France,’ had abused my naivete. […] [M]ost of my efforts had been for France, which I had made my comrades-in-arms appreciate and love. What could have happened, which had not been explained to us?”

This passage is remarkable in that it is so far along in Sajer’s journey, after he has endured the unimaginable and has had so many illusions pried away, but he is still clinging to the fanciful notion of France and Germany as allies. It is true that the Vichy government worked closely with the Nazis following the fall of France in June 1940, and that Sajer’s split identity made him particularly sensitive to the compatibility of those two nationalities. But in light of all he knew and experienced, it is still incredible that he could have considered France and Germany allies.