A 17-Year-Old draftee
on the Eastern Front
for the entire war.
I just started re-reading "The Forgotten Soldier." First published in English in 1971, the book is a memoir by a 17-year-old French boy drafted into the German Army in 1942. The book is 600 pages of wrenching details about the life of a German soldier on the Eastern Front for nearly the entire war.
Though he had no choice about serving, Guy Sajer was scorned when he tried to go home after the war. He suffered cold and every sort of misery and finally defeat, then came home to rejection by family and friends. At the end of World War II, Guy Sajer was just 21 years old and a veteran of nearly four years of continuous combat with a losing army. He was on his way to the front when news reached his convoy of the Russian victory over the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.
I read this book in 1977 when I was a 24-year-old tank commander in West Germany, waiting for a million-man Soviet Army to invade Western Europe starting in Fulda and leaving me and and everyone in 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division dead on the field just west of the Fulda Gap.
Reading this book helped me to understand how the southern men I served with could venerate soldiers who fought to keep other men enslaved. It was clear from this memoir, that a soldier can be a hero in a bad cause.
In 2017 when I visited the German Military Cemetery at Normandy, I thought of Guy Sajer--a kid drafted into a losing cause who serves with honor and heroism until the end. I honor him as a man while knowing the flag that he served under is a symbol of hatred.
After the war, Sajer became a comics artist, creating comics under his own name and pen names. He is 94 years old and lives in Paris.
I will be writing more about specific parts of the book. Anyone interested in the life of a soldier in combat, especially the life of a soldier in a losing cause, this book is a haunting reminder of how terrible war is.
“What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...”
― The Forgotten Soldier
And about how war can tear up our souls:
