The Forgotten Soldier

“I notice that everyone is turning pale. Certainly we can all be excused for this as no one in the company is more than eighteen. I myself won’t be seventeen for another two and a half months. The lieutenant notices our confusion, and to raise our spirits reads us the latest Wehrmacht communique. Von Paulus is on the Volga, von Richtofen is near Moscow, and the Anglo-Americans have suffered great losses in their attempts to bomb the cities and towns of the Reich. Our officer seems reassured by our answering cries of ‘Sieg Heil!’”

Sajer is basically a child when he joins the army, having been conscripted into a forced labor battalion and finding the army to be one of the few available alternatives. As a French citizen, he can note with irony the rousing speeches about the glory of a Reich that has subjugated his own people, but as he indicates, there are probably plenty of Germans in his company with a similarly skeptical view of their officer’s enthusiasm.

“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.