Go to Part 1
Go to Part 2

Part Four (Winter 1943 — Summer 1944)

Following Sajer’s evacuation to the west bank of the Dnieper River, the anticipated German camp where they will be refitted and allowed to rest and recover proves to be an illusion. The chaos that reigned along the east bank is mitigated on the west bank but not eliminated. For men used to German exactitude within the Wehrmacht, the disorder was disconcerting. They are left in the open and then interrogated by military police who seem to view them as cowards if not outright traitors for their retreat. It is a jarring sequence; we know the hell that Sajer and the other survivors endured just to make it to the west bank — their courage and almost-superhuman will to live was beyond doubt. Yet, the retreating men were treated with derision. And the hope that the mighty Dnieper River would stall the Soviet onslaught also proved to be illusory — desperate fighting takes place along the entire front with Kiev being the Soviet focal point. It is at this point that the sheer advantage of Soviet matériel became overwhelming and they appeared to gain almost complete air superiority — to say nothing of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Soviet soldiers.

From the Dnieper, the new German front largely broke, although not without fierce fighting. The Germans were hurled back again in a chaotic and sanguinary retreat through Ukraine. Sajer was, at this point, very sick — and indeed he was sick for seemingly much of the latter half of the book. He developed dysentery and recounted how, in what must have been excruciating, he soiled himself on a moving truck while in acute abdominal pain. He was mortified by the time he finally made it to something like a field hospital — filthy and disgusting in every sense of the term. He was promised leave to rehabilitate but it was cancelled as the situation continued to deteriorate. He is forced to man the line while his illness was still raging. He did this several times. When he and his fellow soldiers were reunited with Hauptmann Wesreidau a few weeks later, Wesreidau asked him if he recovered during his leave to which he responded that he never was able to take it. Wesreidau, as a father figure to Sajer, expressed that enormous sacrifices were expected from all of them. To Sajer’s surprise, his Großdeutschland regiment was fully equipped and supplied with the best of what the Wehrmacht had left and was used as a mobile force sent to weak points in the German lines. While the entire German front continued to collapse, the regiment was moved from one emergency to the next. But at least during this brief period, Sajer tasted victory over the Soviets as opposed to continual retreat. The mobile unit harried the Soviets in offensive action in an otherwise defensive German posture, which was followed inevitably by another retreat. Later, the irony of his “mobile” unit was that it would still be called a “mobile” unit long after it was reduced, either from want of fuel or machines, to being solely on foot.

Throughout the book, and it doesn’t matter when, Sajer describes combat in excruciating detail. The horror and fear are palpable in virtually every combat setting. One description of engagement suffices to convey Sajer’s ability to communicate what he experienced with the caveat that there are many more just like it:

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 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.

In the long retreat through Ukraine, Sajer introduced a new enemy in the guise of newly emboldened “partisans” whom Sajer and the other soldiers despised. Despite the relative successes of Sajer’s unit, the German lines continued to deteriorate across the southern front. There is then a book within a book in which Sajer detailed a war against the partisans during the German withdrawal, which added a new layer of anxiety and trauma for the soldiers. He notes how the same Ukrainian villages that welcomed the Germans as liberators from the Soviet yoke were now crawling with partisans and the unexpected violence that they brought to bear on the retreating Germans. The partisans also exacted a toll on the native population who were suspected of aiding the Germans and made otherwise friendly people wary and unhelpful. It was during this long retreat through Ukraine that Sajer witnessed the death of Hauptmann Wesreidau, who was killed when his car leading the caravan was destroyed by a partisan mine. The death of Wesreidau was a seminal moment for Sajer and the book — the war may have been lost by any measure at that point, but the death of Wesreidau seems to mark the defeat for his men. Collectively, they could not process his death even though they had seen, as a group, thousands of bloodied and disemboweled corpses strewn across the Russian Steppe. At least with Wesreidau, they had a commander who would shepherd them through the worst of what was to come; without him, they were like children without a father.

The partisan aggression grew fiercer as they were supplied by the Soviets with more and more sophisticated weaponry and tactics. Sajer notes another partisan engagement in which he was personally involved with the firefight that left virtually all of the partisans dead — partisans who had derailed a train going back to the front and killed more than a hundred weary German soldiers. Commanded by a group of the S.S., Sajer and other soldiers successfully attacked the partisan stronghold, and in the melee that ensued, Sajer killed his first partisan at very close quarters. A few of the partisans are captured and executed. The S.S. commander justified his actions because the “laws of war condemned them to death automatically, without trial.” Writing twenty years after the war, Sajer drips with anger towards the partisans. He viewed them as something like snakes who violated the rules of war that even the Soviets understood. He also agreed ultimately with the harsh justice meted out to partisans, noting without objection that, “partisans were not eligible for the consideration due to a man in uniform. The laws of war condemned them to death automatically, without trial.”

Part Five (Autumn, 1944 — Spring, 1945)

The German army was pushed from Ukraine. For Sajer and his compatriots, the escape was through Romania into Poland. Like similar retreats, this one was completely disorganized and marked by hunger and desperation. The men traveled back in packs and found a disabled German truck filled with provisions — they glutted themselves after weeks of starvation but only to have two of their group arrested by the military police on the route back and subsequently hanged as thieves. Sajer’s group was eventually organized with other retreating elements and a march back to Poland commenced. Once in Poland, and notwithstanding seemingly complete Soviet air superiority, the men were reorganized again. A theme that runs throughout the book: each successive retreat, which was costly in terms of men and matériel, forced the reorganization of the remaining forces into either a reconstituted version of their earlier units or scratch units altogether. Sajer, Lensen, Hals, and others were greeted again by the rigors of military discipline, which after their ordeal during the last several months was unwelcome. They were placed under the command of Hauptmann Wollers and sent to Lodz where they were resupplied. Sajer notes that many replacements were old men or virtual children; he wondered how these troops would be useful in combat. The Veteran rejoined the group where the division was regrouped and recounted recuperation in Germany; observing that German cities had been bombed into rubble. His ear was also missing. The Veteran explained to the group that this was total war.

The reorganized unit moved to relieve the German soldiers fighting on the northern front and they traversed on foot a new nightmare of endless miles without water or any available provisions. Some have complained that Sajer exaggerated the lack of food during the war but his refrain regarding hunger took center stage very late in the war. Considering that the Wehrmacht had a short supply of trucks, fuel, railcars, and men over a collapsing front the length of Russia, it does not strike me as surprising that the remaining troops would have been lacking food — even for days and weeks. Days of grinding hunger and fatigue blended with the endless and flat terrain in what can only be described as something otherworldly and wretched. It is at this point we wonder, perhaps more globally, what prompted Sajer and his fellow soldiers to survive under these impossible conditions — without food or support — and maintain their fighting prowess. Sajer writes:

Faced with the Russian hurricane, we ran whenever we could. … 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.

On their way to the new front, they met with a completely disorganized group of German soldiers in flight. When Wollers attempted to reorganize them, he was greeted with derision as if the last marks of order within the Wehrmacht had broken down. If there is one passage that marks the end of the war, and there are probably many, it was this sorry scene. These retreating troops were more like starved and crazed refugees than a professional army. They insist that they are the men that were to be relieved and all that waits for Wollers and his relief force at the front is death. The entire sweep of the German soldier’s distress is put into stark relief here — the extreme cold, hunger, fatigue, and filth of the battlefield that existed alongside the disorder and lack of supplies. Their lives had become unbearable. He recalled that in late 1944 that “food was our most difficult problem. For a long time now we had received no supplies. … We became hunters and trappers and nest robbers.” As to the starving troops they encountered in flight, he noted that extreme hunger produced “a curious frame of mind. It is impossible to imagine dying of hunger. Our stomachs digested substances which would kill a comfortable bourgeoisie … in a few weeks.” He said that the situation got so bad that “men… no longer distinguished between enemies and friends … [and] were ready to commit murder for less than a quarter of a meal. … These martyrs to hunger massacred two villages to carry off their supplies of food.”

The group collectively retreated towards East Prussia, which was considered as much Germany then as Berlin or Munich are today. They were reorganized yet again for the defense, but this time of German soil. Lensen, who was the most strident patriot of the group, was East Prussian and excoriated his fellows for their defeatism in light of the pending invasion of Germany by the Soviets. Lensen was by far the most complicated of Sajer’s comrades in the Wehrmacht. Despite Sajer’s loyalty to France and his limited knowledge of the German language, many of his closest comrades still accepted him as a fellow German soldier, but there were a few instances in which Sajer faced abuse for his mixed ancestry. Much earlier in the book, in one of the more significant encounters between Lensen and Sajer, while they were drinking during a lull in the fighting, Lensen began criticizing France after Sajer had sung a French song, and Lensen’s drunken harangue made Sajer question himself and his toughness. He wrote then that “[he] found the war almost totally paralyzing — probably because of my soft French blood.” Sajer concluded that his poor soldiery was the result of his ethnicity and upbringing. However, despite the occasional abuse attributed to his French origins, Sajer felt particular pride at being a soldier in the Wehrmacht, especially after his service in the Großdeutschland in which he promised to “serve Germany and the Fuhrer until victory or death” and expressed his eagerness to “convert the Bolsheviks, like so many Christian knights by the walls of Jerusalem”. Notwithstanding his sometimes-strained relationship with Lensen, he still considered him his friend. Sajer described Lensen’s horrific death under the tracks of a Soviet T-34, which he found fitting, at least in terms of where it took place, ergo, he died in defense of his ancestral home. In Sajer’s accounting, there was no bitterness towards the proud Prussian. It was also during this fighting in East Prussia that Sajer introduced the civilian problem in terms of their pell-mell flight from the Soviets, which complicated the military preparedness to meet them.

Sajer and his compatriots continued to fight a rearguard action and were pushed back in horrific fighting to Memel (now Klaipėda) where they were organized as a defensive barrier to allow the terrified civilian population to escape by ship through Memel’s port on the Baltic Sea. Memel, while not the last battle in which Sajer fought, was the most defining for him. The scene he paints is one of terror. The civilians and the soldiers alike knew what the Soviets would do to them if they were captured — tales of the indiscriminate torture, murders, and rapes (such as the Nemmersdorf massacre by Red Army soldiers in October 1944) were already circulating throughout the civilian populace seeking to flee the Soviet menace.

If they only knew how bad it would be. Some two million Germans lived in East Prussia and had been there for more than six hundred years since the age of the Teutonic Knights — in cities such as Danzig, Königsberg, and Memel — and the entirety of their history, homes, and heritage would be wiped out after the Second World War. Most of the German inhabitants, which then consisted primarily of women, children, and old men, managed to escape the Red Army as part of the largest exodus of people in human history: a population that had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945

After holding the Russians back in vicious and heroic fighting — long enough for almost all the civilians to escape — Sajer, Hals, and a few others made for the docks. It was then under constant aerial bombardment and the Soviets had breached parts of the city. Sajer and the others embarked in a makeshift raft into the icy Baltic, where they were picked up by a passing ship. They made their way to yet another East Prussian town just north of Danzig. There the soldiers experienced a few days of relative recovery but another siege, like that of Memel, was imminent and the evacuation of civilians continued as it had in Memel. Here, Sajer and his group meet the last officer that will demand military rigor of them — and instead of frustration at his insistence, the group was heartened by a relative return to military decorum and order. The evacuation here, however, happened by foot over the frozen Baltic Sea and intermittent isthmus. Civilians and troops marched about twenty-five miles to Danzig over the frozen sea while Soviet bombers dropped bombs to break up the ice to drown them. Once in Danzig, they expected another round of defense and a fight to the death protecting the evacuation, but they received orders to depart to the west. Still fighting until the very end in Danzig, Sajer, Hals and those remaining alive in the Großdeutschland depart for occupied Denmark.

When they landed during the spring of 1945, they are shocked to learn, after making their harrowing seaborne escape, that the Americans and British — and the French — are moving through Germany in a western assault. While the reasoning behind Sajer’s enlistment into the German army was not made explicit, it was cemented and justified by his belief that France would eventually join the Germans in their fight against the Soviets. He believed that Germany was protecting Western Europe by attacking the Soviet Union. At the beginning of Sajer’s long march back to Germany from southern Russia, he continually believed that the French “were already on their way. … The first legionnaires had already set out” to assist them from the mounting Russian onslaught. Sajer thought that Germany and France had established a collaborative government such that the French would be used in the fight against the Soviets. And while thousands of French enlisted to help the Germans, Vichy France remained aloof. He felt as if he had been “betrayed” by France, but the thought of possibly having to kill his fellow countrymen seemed unimaginable to him.

Once in the West, yet another reorganized group of soldiers was formed to resist the Allies, but they were soon captured without any resistance. Each soldier was interrogated, and Sajer’s particular case caused consternation because he was initially deemed a traitor to France but then he was simply allowed to walk away as a liberated French citizen. How or why the Allies changed their minds is never explained. He left the prison yard in a jumble of emotion — so much the more that he did not get to say goodbye to Hals or his other compatriots. His journey home was surreal. His family, after many months of no contact, could not believe that their son had arrived home. As if they understood, Sajer did not speak of the war, nor did his family ask him of it. He joined the French army to rehabilitate his legal standing but was discharged after ten months due to illness. The book ends poignantly enough — in attending a “victory” parade in Paris as a now-French soldier — Sajer recounts silently to himself the memorial of all of the German dead that he had known. To these, he adds one more name — that of Guy Sajer — who too must die as if he lost his life on the Russian Steppe. With no apology or equivocation, he concludes his story.

Reception

It is a mistake to use intense words without carefully weighing and measuring them, or they will have already been used when one needs them later. It’s a mistake, for instance, to use the word ‘frightful’ to describe a few broken-up companions mixed into the ground: but it’s a mistake which might be forgiven. I should perhaps end my account here, because my powers are inadequate for what I have to tell.

The Forgotten Soldier is universally considered one of the best accounts available of the German experience on the eastern front. Sajer’s description of the conflict captures its brutality and its harshness — all in a visceral and authentic voice. He is fearless in what he recounts — documenting the summary execution of partisans and Russian POWs as well as the fear and disorder on the German side. He captures the war in the east in an almost completely unvarnished way — with virtually no effort to sanitize the conflict. Its believability and realism are augmented by his mode of relating the conflict. He hides nothing from his reader — including his refusal to apologize for his involvement. It must be that any soldier’s story, such as this one, endears the reader to the side that the soldier fought on — maybe that is why, more than anything else, this book is hated by some. What is more, Sajer, or at least it seems to me, did not write a book with an agenda beyond telling the story of the men with whom he fought, suffered, and died. His agenda is the story — so that it can be known, and their valor and sacrifice are accorded the recognition that is almost always deprived of the losers in war. In that way, The Forgotten Soldier is a living memorial etched in words to a forgotten generation of men who gave everything for their country — and then some.

While it has similarities to All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in that All Quiet captured the brutality and horror of mechanized modern warfare from the perspective of a young German soldier on the losing side, Remarque wrote his book soon after the war and appeared to have an anti-war agenda in writing it. Sajer’s book is worse — more horrible and more gut-wrenching — and yet even though Sajer is appalled by what happened to him and his fellow soldiers, there is no anti-war agenda per se. All of it is still too raw for him as if he was still shellshocked twenty years after to think in those terms. And if his account was even half-true, his shellshock was well deserved. He seems to want nothing more than for us to listen to him relating what happened. His book humanizes the man and simply does not permit us to “otherize” the German soldier as something less than human. For all of the conjecture that the German soldier was more machine than man, Sajer is proof positive that this idea is nonsense. They lived and died like anyone else; they dreamed of seeing their parents and their sweetheart like anyone else; they bled and cried like anyone else; they were hungry and cold like everyone else; they prayed for victory like everyone else; and they were bewildered and crestfallen in defeat like anyone else.

The Forgotten Soldier is also compelling because it is a coming-of-age story in a context that few can imagine. He developed from a naive youth to a hardened combat veteran through his experience in uniform over the war. During his first few weeks, Sajer’s “knees trembled, and [he] dissolved in tears. [He] could no longer grasp anything that was happening to [him].” By the end of the war, he was a rugged veteran who fought for survival like a wild beast. He survived, in part by luck, but also because, “[w]e fought for reasons which are perhaps shameful, but are, in the end, stronger than any doctrine. We fought for ourselves.” I have always wondered what the German retreat from the highwater mark of the German occupation of Russia must have been like. Through Sajer, I feel like I have a very good idea and it is more terrible than anything I ever imagined.

There are so many other themes and motifs that I could touch upon that are related to what is essentially a survival tale of epic proportions. The will to live, which far deeper than we can imagine; the loss of innocence of a sixteen-year-old boy in a way that is different from moral failings but just as tragic; the destructive futility and inhumanity of modern warfare; the sheer terror of fear; the despair of facing imminent death and surviving only by blind chance; the vacillation between cowardice and heroism; the cold, the hunger, and the exhaustion of the Russian front and the limits of the human body; Russia herself — her endless steppe that stretches beyond the horizon in a treeless mirage of desolation and expanse; and the meaning of the German defeat for the world that we all now take for granted. All of these themes are present in this book — all of the themes could be unpacked over a lifetime.

*        *        *        *

Only happy people have nightmares, from overeating. For those who live a nightmare reality, sleep is a black hole, lost in time, like death.

Notwithstanding my praise for this book — mine and many others — there are still more who hate it. For my part, the disrepute that some have lobbed at The Forgotten Soldier has more to do with ideologies today than it does Germany during WWII. The first is obvious — it is unapologetic of the Wehrmacht, and, to a lesser extent, it is conspicuously silent on Hitler and the Third Reich. Sajer treats the German army and the Third Reich no different than any other losing army and nation in history. There is no odium attached to any of it — other than the senseless carnage that is war. More than that, there is a sense of pride in Germany — a genuine affinity on the part of the author for Germany, its people, and the honor of its fighting men during World War II. Sajer epitomizes a pan-European consciousness even if he never articulates it as such. He grasped that, even as a French citizen, he was part of a broader European civilization. His actions on the field of battle were the greatest proof of that hidden conviction. While it is far from propaganda, the book feels like propaganda for a generation that has been taught to demonize Germany.

In other words, his non-demonization feels like exultant praise. Throughout, even if there is not an explicit defense of the German cause per se, there is a defense of the German soldier almost without equivocation. It is as if he wanted to avenge himself upon every sleight and calumny ever lodged at the rank-and-file soldiers of the Wehrmacht. He writes: “throughout the war, one of the biggest mistakes was to treat German soldiers even worse than prisoners, instead of allowing us to rape and steal — crimes which we were condemned for in the end anyway.” The implication here is obviously that the German soldiers did not rape, steal, and murder with impunity — at least in any systematic way similar to what the Red Army did across eastern and central Europe. Considering that a wide swath of the public believes — and is taught to believe — that German soldiers were active extensions of genocide and slaughter, this defense of Wehrmacht must be like nails on a chalkboard for certain types of modern intellectuals.

The second is also obvious — the Jews are virtually never mentioned. Twenty years after the war, the author must have known about the atrocities committed against the Jews but there is no mention at all of the Holocaust. Nor is there any mention of the racism of the Nazis. The closest Sajer comes to acknowledging the Jews at all is rather oblique: he mentions sightseeing in Poland during his initial training and writes, “[o]ur detachment goes sightseeing in the city, including the famous ghetto — or rather, what’s left of it. We return to the station in small groups. We are all smiling. The Poles smile back, especially the girls.” It could be — and I think this is the most probable explanation — that Sajer’s experience did not overlap with the Jews in any meaningful way, and he never witnessed any atrocities against them. But if one wants the story to be one unrelenting narrative about the Jews, the omission of them is especially galling because, after all, most now think that World War II was about the Jews. Parenthetically, we tend to think of the U.S. Civil War similarly since it is reduced, almost wholly, to that of slavery. As such, just with the Civil War, we lose sight of the other facts that motivated the Second World War, and we turn people and causes into gross caricatures.  The invisibility of the Jews is unforgivable to modern ears, as is the implication that Sajer never witnessed any abuse directed at them by German soldiers. The current gloss, of course, is that the Soviet war was one, long premeditated German pogrom masquerading as an invasion. That Sajer never sees or reports this type of activity is so disconcerting to some that it is to call into question the entire authenticity of his account.

There have been written seemingly hundreds of books about the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews during World War II; it has become the central defining aspect of modern Judaism. Without debating it, I am reminded of Professor Norman Finkelstein’s controversial work, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Finkelstein, a Jew and child of concentration camp prisoners noted that the Holocaust has become the predominant theme in American cultural life — one in which the Holocaust now is treated alone in its utter uniqueness as a mystical measure of human suffering and that the Holocaust casts the Jews as always and everywhere as victims of historical antisemitism that reached its climax during World War II. It doesn’t matter that other groups of human beings have suffered similarly throughout history — the Holocaust is a singularity. To write a book that recounts three years in Russia where the Holocaust was, as we have been taught, raging and never mention the Jews is inexplicable to most modern readers.

I do not begrudge anyone writing to document their particular story — or the story of their people. With that same latitude, it seems to me a book that captures the suffering of the German soldier and the German civilian during World War II is something long overdue. Not every book that is written on the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I must mention the Armenian genocide; similarly, not every book on World War II must preoccupy itself with the Jews. Sometimes it is OK if another people’s grief and sorrow take center stage even if those people were fallen human beings, like everyone else.

The third is related — his description of the Soviets generally and partisans in particular. If one remembers that most of academia was — and remains — sympathetic to communism, the Soviet Union can never be vilified in the same way that the Third Reich is vilified. True enough, they may concede that it was an experiment that failed on the margins but never in its “laudable” aims, which remain quintessentially moral. Sajer’s description then of Soviet brutality has a mark of inexcusable temerity that is most unwelcome for academics who despise Germany and Nazism. Indeed, Sajer takes it for granted that the Soviet Union was an evil country, which is something, ironically enough, he never does regarding the Third Reich. Sajer, to his credit, does not shrink from describing the cruelty meted out to certain Soviet POWs or captured partisans. Sajer does not claim, however, that such treatment was ordinary or practiced widely. But he describes certain treatments that were understood: for example, Soviet prisoners who stole from the bodies of dead German soldiers were summarily executed. He recounts one such gruesome abuse as follows: “the hands of three [Soviet] prisoners [were tied] to the bars of a gate. … [The German soldier] stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats. … The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment”. This type of despicable activity should make anyone sick and here Sajer shared the sentiment; he wrote that incidents such as these “revolted us so much that violent arguments broke out between us and these criminals every time.” The element within the Wehrmacht that was cruel and “criminal” towards Soviet POWs often claimed that they were giving to the Soviets what the Soviets were giving to German POWs. Sajer rejected those claims categorically, “Russian excesses did not in any way excuse us for the excesses by our own side.”

But the broader point, and I think this is understandable assuming the veracity of the account, Sajer describes the Soviets and the Soviet Union as something barbaric and ugly. The conception of the enemy generally leaks over with the conception of the Russians in particular. I think all wars tend to make soldiers dehumanize the army opposing them and Sajer is unexceptional here. His hatred towards the partisans, which was still simmering many years after he was driven from the Soviet Union, is more difficult to understand and more objectionable to modern readers. After all, even from a quasi-objective point of view, the “partisans” were ordinary people resisting an invading army. That Sajer never mentions the systematic abuse of the Russian populace during the occupation or retreat by the German army is something certain critics cannot stomach — especially when Sajer spills much ink on the systematic abuse by the Red Army of the German populace in East Prussia. Not only does the mention of suffering by “guilty” German civilians rankle some; a corresponding omission of suffering by “innocent” Soviet civilians is unforgivable. Modern critics believe, like an article of faith, that the German army committed atrocity after atrocity in the U.S.S.R. — that Sajer mentions none is something that cannot be believed.

The critics of this book — for many of the reasons just mentioned — have attacked it not so much on moral grounds but on its veracity. I suppose that makes sense: if it were a verifiable account, the only argument against would be, “I don’t like it,” which is not an argument at all. So, some have argued that Sajer made it up — maybe he was in Russia for a time, maybe not, but the experiences recounted are largely the stuff of fiction. I won’t debate that beyond noting that others have responded to the alleged proofs of the fictionalized The Forgotten Soldier and offered counter-narratives why it is more likely than not an authentic story. For his part, Mouminoux contended it was authentic but admitted that it was never meant to be a chronological retelling of his time in Russia. He admitted that he may have gotten some details wrong in his memory. The records of the German army, especially later in the war, are in shambles or non-existent. There is no way to prove the argument one way or the other. That said, it struck me as an authentic story — and German veterans from the eastern front have also said that it struck them as consistent with their experiences.

In that sense, does it matter? If Mouminoux wrote what is, at worst, alleged to be a novel, it is a brilliant historical novel that aligns with the experiences of verifiable veterans who were there. Should it matter to me if Guy Sajer was there? Great Memoirs and novels have the power to move us — either way, The Forgotten Soldier is such a book.

Conclusion

Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate and dazed in our demi-tomb. From time to time, one of us would look over the parapet to stare across the dusty plain into the east, from which death might bear down on us at any moment. We felt like lost souls, who had forgotten that men are made for something else, that time exists, and hope, and sentiments other than anguish; that friendship can be more than ephemeral, that love can sometimes occur, that the earth can be productive, and used for something other than burying the dead.

While I became enraptured by this story for the sake of the men involved, God was never far from me or them. Sajer was wrong: he and his fellows were never abandoned. Christianity, much like the Jews, is not a significant part of The Forgotten Soldier. Besides a lustful Catholic chaplain who carries on with a local girl as almost a stock comical character, there is no prayer to speak of and no mention of Divine Providence, one way or another. Our Lord’s name is used in vain throughout. Religious themes and metaphors from our Lord’s Passion are occasionally used to signify the suffering of the soldiers. It is clear that some of the soldiers that Sajer and his friends know are religious and the reason we know that is the occasional abuse that is showered upon such men when they pray instead of act in a given circumstance. But this book is not particularly interested in God. In that sense, it is a thoroughly modern book.

National and international socialism, i.e., Nazism and Soviet communism, were developments of the modern era that had thoroughly rejected God. The war in the east, ironically enough, was fought between two largely atheistic ideologies by many men who carried with them the simple faiths of their Catholic, Orthodox, or even Protestant families. Patriotism and duty — and lest we forget, state compulsion — were more compelling than Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto. The faith passed out of Europe much like it passed out of the Holy Land — and the disappearance of both came because the people were faithless, obstinate, and licentious. By the time World War II began, the faith in Europe had largely disappeared from the agendas and ideologies of secular nation-states. The elites of European society became apostates long before their fellow ordinary citizens ever did. Pockets of faith remain, and they remain today, but Europe, at least in terms of its faith, has been in an accelerating process of religious ossification for a long time. Places of faith have slowly been transformed from central loci of community and spiritual life to museums of a dead cult. The Forgotten Soldier then does not have an agenda per se with God; it simply reflects the accumulated and rotten milieu of several generations of men raised without a sense of public and private faith.

One hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution and fifty years after Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, is it really surprising that we see German soldiers who reflect irreverence and irreligiosity? And even if I have been sensitive to German civilization and German sufferings throughout this essay, and even if I believe that the Soviet Union was more objectionable than the Third Reich (and I do), the reality is that Nazism was an attempt to reconstruct a neopagan cult of ethnos that failed to honor the True God. While my mind has been changed — and I have been red-pilled, as it were — on the question of ethnic and racial homogeneity and its relationship to stable political order, the reality is that ethnos without some correspondence to a cult — and the True cult — is a half-measure that must inevitably fail.

Setting aside the neo-paganism, before we simply condemn the German aspiration of a Germany peopled and ruled by Germans, as articulated by the National Socialists, we should pause to consider whether we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Nazi Party platform, mentioned above concerning the Treaty of Versailles, endorsed a coextensive political state that corresponded with the “racial” elements of Germans. In other words, the Nazis wanted Germany to be populated by citizens who were German. They were:

4. None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed may be. No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the nation.
5. Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest and must be regarded as being subject to foreign laws.
6. The right of voting on the state’s government and legislation is to be enjoyed by the citizen of the state alone. We demand therefore that all official appointments, of whatever kind, shall be granted to citizens of the state alone. We oppose the corrupting custom of parliament of filling posts merely with a view to party considerations, and without reference to character or capability.
7. We demand that the state be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to nourish the total population of the State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) must be excluded from the Reich.
8. All immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since 2 August 1914, be required immediately to leave the Reich.
9. All citizens of the state shall be equal as regards rights and obligations.

Contained within this portion of the platform is the idea that ethnic homogeneity, territory, and sovereignty ought to converge in political reality. This type of platform is, of course, anathema to the modern, globalist Americanist ideology today, but, ironically enough, these six planks of the Nazi platform essentially mirror the modern state of Israel’s Jewish political character. In particular, the so-called legal “right of return” for any Jew to acquire Israeli citizenship and the express adoption in 2018 in law that Israel is defined as a nation-state for the Jewish people has a remarkable degree of concurrence with the National Socialist view that Germany ought to be defined as a nation-state for the German people. It is absurd to suggest that this aspiration was per se immoral — the aim of cohesion between state and people politically is only alleged to be immoral when a person of European stock suggests it for their people.

Many would be grievously offended by my comparison of Israel to the Third Reich but my point, and it should be obvious, is that there are countries today that pursue the same type of folkish policies — namely Israel — that tie a land to exclusively to a people. And I agree with that idea more and more, i.e., “blood and soil” has a currency in my life that it never did before. To the extent that it makes me liable to the charge of intellectual Nazism (which is ridiculous), it makes me equally liable to the charge of Zionism. It is no thought crime in the United States to support Zionism as it relates to the Jews in a sliver of land that borders the Mediterranean Sea; likewise, it should not be a thought crime to support the similar idea that European peoples too ought to have a political state tied to the land and their particular people and culture. One cannot be simultaneously a “beyond-the-pale” racist and a wonderful person for espousing the same idea. I refuse to abide by such cognitive dissonance. For my part, however, the ambition to preserve the culture, language, and the stock of a people is reasonable but without Catholicism as its animating soul, it becomes just another idolatry (viz., the idol being the folk themselves). Preserving a people without preserving their souls in the True Faith is a futile project of which I want no part.

And what we see in the suffering of the German soldiers on the eastern front through Sajer is misery and anguish without God and reason. True enough, the ghosts of duty and history animate them. The notion of patriotism motivates them. And the awful specter of fear and death move them. But their suffering is rooted in the dirt of this world — it is materialist and crimped. A man with faith — who fights for faith alongside kith and kin — dies differently than a man merely avoiding death for an idea of this world. Both can be heroic, but the effect of heroism is very different on them. The soldier with faith is immune to cynicism; the soldier without faith becomes overwhelmed by it. Ultimately this is why The Forgotten Soldier is ultimately a secular school of suffering and cynicism that destroys the heart. Suffering for an idol — a false god — is something that eventually destroys man’s natural religious inclinations to look and find the True God. Suffering, which is man’s lot, is either suffered unwillingly and angrily or is suffered willingly and meekly. It is either redemptive if it is fused to the Cross of our Savior or it is destructive if it is fused with anything else. For both, it is always endured reluctantly but only Christianity provides an understanding of this human constant and mystery that makes more than sense — it transforms it. We all suffer. The vital question is how we are shaped by it. The men of The Forgotten Soldier were destroyed by their suffering — in a context of a war that destroyed everything else. Germany is a place, and the Germans are a people, but neither can supply the transcendent reason for suffering adequately. No country or people can.

That I have a different view of World War II — and who its villains and heroes were — does not mean that I condone the idol of race or ethnos. If Germany embraced a racial idol while pursuing otherwise sensible policies of economics, foreign policy, and immigration, I do not condone their racial idol. They failed, at least in my estimation, because of the delta that existed between the principles of their racial idol and the True Faith. For my part, I see the value of homogeneity and the political state but what is more important to me is that the state be true to God. The two need not be mutually exclusive despite the liberal rot within the Church that claims otherwise. It is a false choice between Americanism and Nazism — we Catholics ought to strive for something better. I suppose the difference between my view and that of the conventional demonization of Germany is that I choose to splice the good and the evil from the Third Reich, just as I do the same for the Allies. The “Axis” and the “Allies” are not talismanic terms that confer the magical properties of good and evil. And even if I abhor many policies pursued by the German government during the Nazi era — like, for example, the liquidation of the “useless bread gobblers” or the forced deportation and migration of the Jews and Gypsies which led to their wanton destruction, among many others, that resulted in the deaths of millions — I choose to take a wider view of the historical contest that existed then and exists now. That wider view is what intellectuals do in every other context of history.

*        *        *        *

Peace has brought me 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 one should never, even for an instant, long for war!

The paradox of an experience, like the one recounted in The Forgotten Soldier, is the dual recognition that life during the crucible was hellish, but, at the same time, it was the only time that such men felt alive. He captures this dilemma well — no one should long for war but there is a vitality of life that throbs when life itself hangs in the balance in a real and unrelenting way. Parenthetically, this is why young men often seek out dangerous activities gratuitously. What makes all of this horrible — what makes it abusively horrible — is that the men of Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS who survived the ordeal of Russia never had a country to which they could return. I am not discussing here things like the aged veterans gathering for the dedication of a war memorial or gathering for drinks at the equivalent of the VFW. No, these men had to endure silence and shame and a refusal to acknowledge their sacrifice. Even if the post-war German bureaucracy accorded some of them pensions for time served, the shame of the war imposed by the Allies created something that made their sacrifice border on dishonorable.

By contrast, the American South, which was similarly smashed as a nation, managed to honor its war dead and surviving veterans as taking part in something honorable even if defeated. It was only until the United States lost its mind — well into the twenty-first century and long after such veterans were dead — that such monuments and memorials were pulled down to satiate an irreverent and evil mob. There was no “lost cause” in Germany and no honor was given to these men who sacrificed enormously. Wesreidau’s comments to his men then proved prophetic when he said, “With our deaths, all the prodigies of heroism which our daily circumstances require of us, and the memory of our comrades, dead and alive, and our communion of spirits, our fears and our hopes, will vanish, and our history will never be told. Future generations will speak only of an idiotic, unqualified sacrifice.” Sajer did what he could to tell their history.

*        *        *        *

I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn’t expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything — fortune, love, even a limb — if I could simply survive.

Guy Mouminoux may have traded any semblance of a normal life to just survive World War II, but he did something much more. As someone who participated from outside of Germany, he was uniquely able to pay homage to these men. For all of the hatred and bile poured upon Germany for almost the full extent of the twentieth century, Sajer did something that bucked the trend: He said enough and told his story.

Saint Boniface, pray for us.

“Only the victors have stories to tell. We, the vanquished, were all cowards and weaklings by then, whose memories, fears, and enthusiasms should not be remembered.”

The Forgotten Soldier 
Guy Sajer
Editions Robert Laffont, 1967; translation copyright 1971 by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Audible edition

The other side was bitter beyond belief.

*         *         *         *

By the spring of 1945, Germany was reduced to a smoldering ruin. One of the most advanced countries in the world saw every one of its cities obliterated into rubble and fire. Basic infrastructure such as water, sewage, electricity, transportation, and communication all but disappeared. Starvation reigned for three years after the Allies occupied Germany in what can only be described as a punitive famine designed for German prisoners of war (POWs) and German civilians alike. The death toll for Germany as a proportion of her population was staggering. For a country of approximately fifty million in 1939, some five million men were killed during the war, and civilian deaths from Allied bombing are estimated at another half a million. Up to two million more were forced into murderous labor in the Soviet Union’s notorious archipelago of prison camps with only a tiny fraction ever returning home.

In the West, the Allied forces committed their form of genocide against German POWs at the little-acknowledged Rheinwiesenlager camps, in which German and Axis prisoners were held in conditions that rivaled the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. In what was a criminal violation of the Geneva Convention, General Eisenhower’s staff decided that German soldiers should not be classed as POWs, but under a new and fictitious designation of “disarmed enemy forces” (DEFs). As DEFs, rather than POWs, the men were deprived of the Geneva Convention’s protections — they were starved, denied medical attention, and even rudimentary shelter. Although the precise number will never be available, some estimates put one million German POW deaths in Allied post-war concentration camps. German women, especially in the east, suffered the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history at the hands of the Red Army. Some estimates are that two million German women were raped repeatedly — and almost a quarter of a million died as a result. And it wasn’t simply the Soviets, the U.S. Army is alleged to have raped almost 200,000 German women. And all of this says nothing of another crime against humanity: the ethnic cleansing of Germans through the forced expulsion of some sixteen million ethnic Germans in the former eastern territories of Germany (lost during either the First or Second World War — Austria-Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Czechoslovakia).

Most of this is not known — or certainly ever talked about — by even those with a passing knowledge of World War II.

But all of this happened: what is shown cumulatively is that very few nations were destroyed to the extent that the German nation was destroyed during and after World War II. Wars often result in a terrible toll for the vanquished: what happened to Germany after World War II rivals almost anything in history. Nevertheless, what I have written would strike many as curious in the latter-day West; after all, who cares? Why would anybody bother with cataloging the suffering of Germans — especially after the Second World War? The implied but overwhelming sentiment is that if terrible things happened to German people during and after the war, Germany was egregiously culpable, and empathy should be our last concern. After all, they were “Nazis,” and the mere incantation of “Nazis” implicitly excuses any atrocity committed against Germany during or after the war. Popular albeit dubious books have been written such as Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust by Daniel Goldhagen, which argued in 1996 that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were “willing executioners” in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent “eliminationist antisemitism” in German political culture. This type of sentiment is widely shared and widely disseminated such that the word “Nazi” has obtained a currency of almost demonic, sub-human proportions.

If this sounds like an idea alien to a Catholic ethos, it most certainly is.

To be interested or even empathetic to the enormous scale of German suffering is to invite suspicion that the humanizer must himself suffer from the same type of moral degeneracy as the Nazis themselves. Simply stated, taking stock of German wartime or post-wartime suffering — whether it be, for example, allied war crimes like the Dresden firebombing or the appalling treatment of German POWs by the Allied forces in the west or by “Uncle Joe” and the Soviet Union in the east — is verboten in polite Western company. Not, of course, as strictly verboten as questioning the scale or extent of the Holocaust, but verboten, nonetheless. For “conservatives” who now clutch their pearls at the excesses of contemporary “cancel culture,” the mirage of “free speech,” and the destruction of individuals for the espousal of unpopular or unconventional opinions, they do not seem to realize that “cancel culture” has been around for a very, very long time in the United States.

Alas, it doesn’t matter much to me anymore.

Germanic blood — along with that of the Celtic and Nordic peoples — courses through my veins. Far from being ashamed of it, I honor it. As I have gotten older — and less Americanist — I have come to appreciate my ancestry and the history of my people. The first principle of deracination is to uproot a man from his family and the communitarian aspect of his heritage — so, it follows, the first remedy against the deracinating impact of Americanism is to re-root me within my people and culture. For the sake of the obvious, such a reflowering of affection for a people and culture is not tantamount to a supremacist notion. My family and my heritage aren’t better than anyone else’s; it is just my own. Thus, I deny no man the right to glory in his heritage and ancestors, but I refuse to countenance those who would deny me the same. I do not have to justify the sympathy that I feel acutely for the plight of my extended kin, and yes, my kin are Europeans.

As a Catholic by spirit and a European by blood, it is enough for me to lament the horrors of World War II, which, like the First World War, was an unmitigated killing field for the people who made up Western Civilization — my birthright. I feel for the sufferers no matter where they lived or to what European nation they belonged. More to the point, as a Catholic, vengeance is not mine; I do not carry it against my enemy and I certain do not carry it against my kin. We all know that Germany lost and paid an horrific price in blood, soil, and reputation. And yet look at the dystopia which we have inherited. The Anglo-American world order of internationalist bankers, war profiteers, and industrialists won, and that order was imposed the world over. It is only now when the wretchedness and moral depravity at the heart of that order is being exposed are some — really a few — Americans waking up to a different narrative altogether. But here too the rabbit hole extends much deeper than we might imagine.

Much of what we “know” and believe about the Second World War is the overhang of grotesque anti-German propaganda manufactured in London, Washington, and Moscow during the war. It is hard to separate fact from fiction in this regard. Indeed, it is amazing how such propaganda can lose its palpable absurdity and morph over time into axiomatic “reality” — and a reality that cannot be questioned without suffering enormous consequences. The undeniable fact is that there are wide swaths of “history” that are morally beyond question, and which have obtained a quasi-religious status of an orthodoxy that can only be scrutinized if we are comfortable with the status of a secular heretic. What we must accept as unquestionable “fact” as it relates to German war crimes is therefore problematic on several levels. The issue is that even questioning the veracity, or the extent, of German war crimes is to expose oneself to the charge of “denialism,” as if critical scholarship itself that serves to find the truth is somehow dangerous. The problem becomes all the more acute when those who are defamed are in no position to rebut the absurdities because they are, well, dead. But then again much of what we know about most of U.S. history is so slanted that it borders on fabrication if it is not in fact a fabrication. It is incredible that most American “conservatives” still believe reflexively that Americans have always been the “good guys.” It is even more unbelievable for American Catholics to believe it. For my part, it is a childish naiveté and credulity that I find it more and more difficult to stomach the older I become. It is a testament to our brainwashing and conditioning that we lack even the rudiments of curiosity. At least since the Trump presidency, many Americans realize that the press and media are complete shills and liars. Seemingly the only good development in recent years has been the catastrophic loss of trust in American institutions of every variety. Such trust was always misplaced. Yes, the time will come for a reevaluation of everything that we were taught, but that time is not now — our cultural censors will not allow it, and the vast majority of our people are, to put it bluntly, too stupid to seek it.

Now, some eighty years after the war, I feel no incentive to continue moral leprosy attributed to Germany when I stare now into the abyss of the American leviathan. Indeed, I have never been more estranged from the country of my birth than I am today. Moreover, even if I contextualize it, the horror of Stalin’s Soviet Union was much worse than Hitler’s National Socialism. That sentiment alone puts me in a category of the grossly immoral — a thought criminal by any conventional standard. Even if I concede their equality (which I do not), the support of the United States and Great Britain enabled the U.S.S.R. to continue enslaving millions of Russians and enslaving millions more other Europeans after WWII. Where is the “Truth & Reconciliation” committee for those crimes? If all Germans are responsible for Nazism, who then is responsible for the murderous monstrosity of the Soviet Union? Where is their commensurate excommunication? Whatever Germany did — or was alleged to have done — she paid for it richly. To use a Yiddish expression that I learned from an Orthodox Jew, it is time for rachmones, which means four things in one: mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and empathy. Typically, rachmones is something Jews only afford to other Jews based upon ties of blood and faith; here, I do the same for those whom I am tied to by blood and faith.

*         *         *         *

When I was a young man, I raised my right hand and repeated the oath of enlistment to join the United States military. To preserve my obscurity, I will not belabor the details. That said, the act strangely stays fixed in my memory. It was not in a fit of patriotism that I did it although that played a small role. I was in the middle of college — home for Christmas break. At the time, and as mediated through a nineteen-year-old brain, I joined the military because, at least then, I wanted to become a history professor. My surmise was that having some facility and familiarity with the military and its culture would be helpful to that future career. The G.I. Bill would also help me finish college. I viewed myself as something akin to an academic observer of the military who would learn of it on-the-job, as it were. While I did not enlist to write a story, like George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, I joined to learn about the military more than to ever be in it — almost as if it were a sociological experiment. Only later, in the midst of it, did I realize how ridiculous that sentiment was, and only then did I think I should have joined because it was good in its own right.

My interest in history and my experience in the military, however, has never meant that I had an interest in the military or military life per se. Truth be told, the passions of my intellectual life have always vacillated between history, religion, politics, and philosophy. Stories of war for the sake of thinking about war held little appeal to me. As a boy at heart, bright, shiny metal things always grab my attention, so I occasionally find myself looking up pictures of armor, planes, tanks, jets, ramparts, or missiles but even this is ephemeral. Now, I have read seemingly hundreds of books on various wars, but I always read them in the context of movements of history, religion, and ideology. I have worn out all the titles I could find on the U.S. Civil War, WWI, and WWII. I have read book after book on the Crusades, the Reconquista, and other European wars. I have read Thucydides and Xenophon. I have read about Carthage and Actium. I have read about Malta and Lepanto. While some of them involve the unique suffering and trauma of being a warrior or a soldier, I never read them for that purpose. To put it bluntly, the “soldier’s story” genre of writing never interested me much, and neither did the strategy or tactics of war or the implements of war used. Indeed, I usually gloss over the pages of maps in such war books marked by arrows and troop movements.

My opinion of this genre, however, may change. In recently reading Guy Sajer’s memoir of a German soldier’s experience on the Russian front, The Forgotten Soldier, I must admit that I have found a book that moved me as few books of any genre have. It is as powerful as it is devastating — from start to finish — as anything that I have read, which is no small feat. When I take it all in, it is not the genre per se that makes this book what it is — no, it is a story of a soul subjected to suffering and deprivation that is almost incomprehensible coupled with an ability to communicate that suffering. As an inveterate reader, I say the following with some experience: sometimes a book “hits” a reader at a particular point in which the book was exactly what the reader wanted. Such moments in a reader’s life are relatively rare but the pure serendipity of finding something that you were looking for is similar to finding the pearl of great price. And, for whatever reason, I wanted to read this book. So, I realize that my praise of the book is flavored by the serendipitous time in which I read it. But all the same, I loved The Forgotten Soldier. Like any story, anguish is all too human and all too humanizing — in one way or another, it marks our time as fallen men. That type of story, which can take place in war but need not, is something if honestly presented by a sensitive soul that has the power to change us. But the reality is, however, that this is a consummate war book — and a war book that chronicles some of the most beastly modern warfare ever fought. And as the resting place for so many fallen comrades, it is a book that Sajer insists that we treat venerably as if we are walking hallowed literary ground. He tells us so bluntly in the beginning that this is no ordinary story:

Too many people learn about war with no inconvenience to themselves. They read about Verdun or Stalingrad without comprehension, sitting in a comfortable armchair, with their feet beside the fire, preparing to go about their business the next day, as usual. One should really read such accounts under compulsion, in discomfort, considering oneself fortunate not to be describing the events in a letter home, writing from a hole in the mud. One should read about war in the worst circumstances, when everything is going badly, remembering that the torments of peace are trivial, and not worth any white hairs. Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary. One should read about war standing up, late at night, when one is tired, as I am writing about it now, at dawn, while my asthma attack wears off. And even now, in my sleepless exhaustion, how gentle and easy peace seems!

Truth be told, I understood from the beginning that Sajer was also no ordinary writer. But even if it is a book of death and war, a great book such as this one can be likened to a romance — a fit of love in a life otherwise ordinarily led. Such a book need not be a romance — all it needs to do is make us take stock of our lives and see the world through another’s eyes. If that is at least one test of a great book, The Forgotten Soldier is truly a great book. And I can say now that The Forgotten Soldier is a book that I will read again — and again — and that is something I can say of very few books.

*         *         *         *

The Forgotten Soldier is the memoir of Guy Sajer (pseudonym of Guy Mouminoux). It was written about twenty years after the war in a style that reads very much like a novel — Sajer reconstructs dialogue that it is difficult to imagine that he remembered with precision. Dates and places are often obscure — and it is implicit that the “fog of war” enveloped and excused his inability to tell something akin to a dispassionate narrative of his history in the Wehrmacht. His style of writing, perhaps in translation from French, can be repetitive at times, at least in terms of the frequent use of certain descriptors over and over again. That said, it has the feel of someone who was there, and I found authenticity in the arc of his descriptions. While some have accused Mouminoux of inventing The Forgotten Soldier out of whole cloth, the book never struck me as something that even hinted at fraud. The book indeed recounts so many near-misses of death — so many close encounters — that one is almost incredulous that anyone could have survived what he describes. Indeed, some critics of the book claim that it reads like the recounting of every soldier’s tale of woe in the east stitched together for drama and effect. To that I would respond the if someone survived the successive retreats from near the Volga to the Baltic Sea over three years, the account is more or less what I would expect. The incredulity is not in the account but that anyone survived. Moreover, the men that did survive would tell similar stories to what Sajer writes. The fact of their survival necessarily means that they were “lucky” compared with the hundreds of thousands who did not. The incredible nature of his survival then is not an argument against the book. We would not have had it otherwise.

Mouminoux was born in 1927 in Lorraine to a French father and German mother, whose maiden name was Sajer. He died in his mid-nineties in 2022 and found fame as a cartoonist and artist in France — and as a writer of The Forgotten Soldier. His mixed Alsatian ancestry looms large throughout the book. In 1942, as a young teenager, Mouminoux joined the Wehrmacht under his mother’s maiden name evidently to accentuate his German ancestry. In the beginning, he offers a glimpse of who he thought he was alongside portents of what was to follow:

Guy Sajer … who are you?

My parents were country people, born some hundreds of miles apart — a distance filled with difficulties, strange complexities, jumbled frontiers, and sentiments which were equivalent but untranslatable. I was produced by this alliance, straddling this delicate combination, with only one life to deal with its manifold problems. I was a child, but that is without significance.

The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them. Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love. I had to shoulder a brutally heavy burden. Suddenly there were two flags for me to honor, and two lines of defense — the Siegfried and the Maginot — and powerful external enemies. I entered the service, dreamed, and hoped. I also knew cold and fear in places never seen by Lilli Marlene. A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.

It was not clear to me whether he enlisted or was conscripted. What is clear is that he volunteered for the Luftwaffe but was not accepted. After his initial training, Sajer was sent to a logistics/transportation unit (the Rollbahn) to load and drive trucks bringing supplies to the front in southern Russia. In the Rollbahn, he met several other men who would become his close companions throughout the war. He chronicles the war from his training through the destruction of the German army in the East to his brief sojourn and surrender in the West. The three years he recounts, almost all of which take place in the East, are the most gut-wrenching account of the war that I have ever read. Even though the book is virtually an uninterrupted story of privation, death, suffering, and misery, I was crestfallen to leave Guy Sajer — and for me, the sorrow at finishing a book is one of the telltale signs of its quality and poignancy.

*         *         *         *

Part One (Autumn, 1942). The Forgotten Soldier starts in earnest with Sajer’s mission to supply the German front in Russia as a member of the Rollbahn. It seems clear, although unstated, that teenagers, older men, and disabled veterans were assigned to these logistics and supply support units at this point in the war. Sajer, as a teenager probably still baby-faced, was assigned to this unit. The dangerous trek of supplies and war matériel, which were shipped by train, truck, and beast of burden, was made over an incredible distance with the ultimate destination being the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Most of the journey was made in the company of his new companions: Lensen, Olensheim, Neubach, and Hals, who spoke French.

The journey made during the late fall of 1942 into the early winter is itself a demonstration of the sheer logistical nightmare of what an invasion and occupation of a country the size of Russia meant. Warsaw to Stalingrad on the banks of the Volga River is more than 1,500 miles in distance — and this distance was traversed using 1940s diesel trucks on practically non-existent Soviet roads in cold that rivals the Artic circle. Sajer is candid in his view that he was not ready for the privations that the war was already imposing on him; he writes, “I can remember crying out between bursts of sobs: I’m too young to be a soldier.” The immensity of the logistical problems associated with just Sajer’s description of the small part he played in supplying troops along the far-flung Soviet front is a microcosm of why, even after success after success in the beginning, Germany’s defeat of the Soviet Union was always so precarious. The theme of the sheer and unforgiving expanse of Russia is played out over and over again throughout the book.

His unit faced considerable difficulty in managing to remain supplied and the transportation situation—grave to begin with—was seriously hampered by the freezing temperatures and constant snow. Temperatures that plummeted to twenty degrees below zero, diesel trucks that would not start, inadequate clothing and the accompanying frostbite, inadequate shelter, and wool gloves that became filled with holes from constant shoveling of snow were only part of the misery that was the Russian winter for the ill-prepared Sajer. He recounted the effect that the first dead body — a Soviet soldier — had on him on his initial trip east. The irony is not lost on the memoirist in Sajer — he would see many, many more. The soldiers suffered much from the cold and their freezing is a major preoccupation of this part. The Russian cold remained a thematic element throughout the book considering that Sajer went through three more winters before the end of the war, but the maddening cold is a constant refrain initially. It seems to me that the cold takes center stage early because it was Sajer’s first true enemy and he was ill-prepared to face it — later, combat, death, illness, exhaustion, and hunger would become enemies in a degree proportionate to the punishing cold. But here, it is one page after another of what, for example, a midnight watch is like in conditions of thirty-five degrees below zero.

Toward Stalingrad, Sajer’s traveled from Bialystok to Minsk, on to Kiev, and finally to Kharkiv. Surviving a few firefights, Sajer reached the eastern front to resupply fighting units only to learn that the Sixth German Army commanded by Field Marshall Paulus had been encircled and captured at Stalingrad. As if to anticipate what will come, Sajer foreshadowed the expected brutality that he can expect forthwith in the words of a desperate message from a trapped soldier in Stalingrad that a German officer reads to the assembled men as proof of German valor; it is:

We are the last seven survivors in this place. Four of us are wounded. We have been entrenched in the wreckage of the tractor factory for four days. We have not had any food for four days. I have just opened the last magazine for my automatic. In ten minutes the Bolsheviks will overrun us. Tell my father that I have done my duty, and that I shall know how to die. Long live Germany! Heil Hitler!’

Sajer recounted the horrors of the fighting that followed the fallout from the Wehrmacht’s defeat at Stalingrad and the first retreat from the Don. After Stalingrad, Sajer introduces a theme that will play a larger role as the book progresses and the German prospects deteriorated: namely, defeatism. As the war began to turn against Germany and the slow retreat westward was ordered, Sajer notes how a change occurred in the attitudes of German soldiers from staunch patriotism towards the will to survive regardless of ideologies and leaders. He notes after Stalingrad how the “older men were, generally speaking, defeatist, while the younger ones were determined to liberate their comrades,” probably because the younger soldiers had yet to witness the horrors of war.

There is an irony here that has application beyond Sajer’s observation; the young are almost always more instinctively heroic than the old — and the old cling to life much more tenaciously than the young. Sajer, as a very young man, exemplified anti-defeatism early on in the war, which was evident by his anger at an older soldier for feeling relieved about the surrender at Stalingrad, although his attitude later changed as he and his comrades became battle-hardened and battle-scarred veterans. It is not surprising to me that an older German soldier might have expressed relief at the prospect of not having to relieve Stalingrad with its building-to-building fighting — but it is cowardly all the same, i.e., better than a half million soldiers are annihilated than I face death to help them. Later the war would chasten his enthusiasm; Sajer said he and his comrades, fighting on the Second Dnieper Front against a superior Russian army, that they “no longer fought for Hitler, or National Socialism, or the Third Reich. … We fought from simple fear … for reasons which are perhaps shameful, but are, in the end, stronger than any doctrine.”

During this first retreat, Sajer’s first true friend in the army, Ernst Neubach, was killed by Soviet strafing in a truck driven by Sajer filled with seriously wounded men. If the first dead body witnessed by Sajer shocked him with almost morbid curiosity and wonder, this death, while far from the last, broke him. During this first retreat and Neubach’s death, we catch a glimpse of Soviet air superiority and the havoc that it wreaked over German supply lines. Part of the terror of the book is that the men looked to the sky with dread because the Soviet planes always meant death for some of them. The Luftwaffe, while almost always superior to the Soviet air force when it was available, was outnumbered by a factor of 10 by the time Sajer and his compatriots began their retreat from the environs of Stalingrad. Later in the war, the German planes would be outnumbered by a factor of 100 and the buzz of planes in the sky always portended death from above. Neubach’s death, which took place in Sajer’s arms, was awful. He refused to accept the death of his friend and stopped the convoy with manful moxie to demand that someone treat his mortally wounded friend. The men of the convoy, which had to make good time to simply survive were incredulous that one more dying German amid so many wounded and dying men (who suffered without any care) should stop their progress. The entire episode was a brutal juxtaposition of personal anguish with the general insensitivity to great suffering. In the end, Sajer’s will prevailed; his demands were met and Neubach’s body was “buried” in a shallow grave while Sajer looked on in stupefied disbelief. Even in the mortars and shells, in the cold and hunger, the war became real for Sajer through the death of a friend in his arms. The progression of the memoir is one devastating blow after another for Sajer and his companions. The account itself is a testament to the incredible limits of human suffering and the capacity for finding some reason — really any reason — to put one foot in front of the other in the face of truly horrendous circumstances.

---

Appendix: The Historical Context of The Forgotten Soldier.

Sajer’s account from 1942 to 1945 requires some historical context to appreciate his situation. The German Empire was cobbled together from varying German-speaking principalities and independent states under the leadership of Prussia in 1871. Coincidentally, Italy completed its national unification in the same year. The union of Germany was hastened by the stunning success of the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. In the final days of the war, with German success all but assured, the German union was proclaimed as the German Empire under the Prussian King Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Except for Austria, almost all German speakers were united in a nation-state for the first time. Parenthetically, the word Reich is almost always translated into English as “empire,” but this definition, which has its imperial baggage, is not quite accurate. The word conveys meaning more akin to realm or domain — as in the Reich is the realm of the Germans. While Reich could be expansive and imperial, it need not be. The Treaty of Frankfurt that ended the Franco-Prussian War gave most of Alsace and parts of Lorraine, the Franco-German borderland between both countries, to Germany. It would remain under German sovereignty for the next fifty years until it was returned to France after the First World War. Alsace-Lorraine and its uniquely fused Franco-German character figure prominently in The Forgotten Soldier.

Without getting into the particulars of the causes of the First World War that began in August 1914, it is one of the few wars for which culpability is difficult to assign. For a war that ruined a continent (Europe) and destroyed a race (Europeans), it is disconcerting that such a war and carnage of untold proportions lacks a villain. It was simply a suicidal slaughter of epic proportions for no reason at all — yet the modern world as we know it was largely born in the aftermath of the First World War. Four empires ceased to exist and were carved up after the war (Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman) and many new sovereign countries were born out of their carcasses. Marxism-Leninism was first implemented at the level of a sovereign state in the husk of the former Russian Empire in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, which unleashed untold sorrows for the world. Even today, as it relates to the intersection of borders and ideology, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict has its antecedents in the aftermath of World War One.

After four years of bitter fighting, a staggering death toll (on all sides), the entry of the United States against Germany in 1917, and the mass starvation of the German population in which some half a million civilians died of hunger brought about by the British naval blockade, the German government capitulated to an armistice famously signed on the eleventh day of the eleventh month (11/11/1918) or what we now know as Veteran’s Day in the United States. Armistice Day, as it used to be known, concluded in the infamous Treaty of Versailles in which much of the German Empire was dismembered, impoverished, and degraded. For a country that surrendered without ever being occupied and without being at fault for the war in any meaningful sense, Versailles was viciously and stupidly one-sided.

To compare the borders of the German Empire to its borders today (or its borders after Versailles) is to see the sheer extent of diminution of the German state. Millions of Germans were left outside of the newly shrunken Germany in 1919 — and left in new sovereign countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia. Prussia was carved up in particular. The cutting up of the German Empire to form new countries led to certain geographic anomalies: one of the larger German cities, the ancient port city of Danzig in East Prussia (now the Polish city of Gdansk), where some half million Germans lived as some 90% of its population, was cut off completely from the post-WWI German state and administered under Polish rule as a “free city-state.” To look at a map today is to see how far inside Poland Gdansk is — or, stated differently, how far Germany once extended. The famous “Sudetenland Crisis” in 1938, which concluded in the Munich Conference and Germany’s reabsorption of the Sudetenland (and its some three million ethnic Germans) from Czechoslovakia, was prompted by Versailles’s removal of those same Germans from the post-WWI German state. For a war that brought the world horrendous misery and destruction without sensible culpability, the grossly unfair obligations, terms, and national dismemberments of Versailles imposed by the victors (the Allied French, Germans, Americans, and Italians) at the expense of the vanquished (Germany, Austria-Hungry, and Ottomans) were, in hindsight, idiotic and immoral. If an honorable peace had been struck, there is little doubt that World War II would have never been fought.

Among many other reasons, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power is difficult to imagine without the humiliating specter of Versailles haunting Germany. Similarly, the rise of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union and the threat that the Reds represented to Germany and other western European countries was another enormous factor as well. To make this point, it is worthwhile to revisit the party platform of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the “NSDAP” or “Nazis”) that eventually swept the Nazis into power. Like all political parties, the Nazis put forward a program based on values, grievances, and vision. To read it now — or at least parts of it — almost a century later is to understand its appeal. It is noteworthy that the first three and a subsequent one of that platform deal expressly with Versailles (1–3, 22).[1]

• We demand the union of all Germans to form the Greater Germany on the basis of the people’s right to self-determination enjoyed by the nations.
• We demand equality of rights for the German people in its dealings with other nations; and abolition of the peace treaties of Versailles and St. Germain.
• We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people and colonization for our superfluous population.

….

• We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the Treaty of Versailles in the rise of the Nazis in Germany. And from a foreign policy perspective, everything that Germany pursued during the interwar period after the accession of Adolf Hitler in 1933 involved the reversal of the injustice done to Germany at Versailles and the restoration of Germany on terms similar to any other country. It is important to note that many non-Germans agreed that Germany’s grievances were legitimate. What is often overlooked is the success by hook or crook of the Third Reich’s attempt to reconstitute the extent and domains of Germany following Versailles: the reoccupation and remilitarization of German territory in the Rhineland (March 1936); German annexation of Austria or Anschluss (March 1938); German annexation of the Sudetenland following the Munich Conference (September 1938); and the return of the former Prussian territory of Memelland (now Klaipėda) (March 1939). (The siege of Memel in late 1944 and early 1945 figures prominently in The Forgotten Soldier.)

However, it is worth noting that Hitler’s final attempt to reconstitute Germany from its dismemberment following World War One ultimately led to World War Two. The precipitating factor was a diplomatic crisis over Danzig. Point 13 of President Woodrow Wilson’s infamous “14 Points” demanded that: “[a]n independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.” By “access to the sea,” Wilson meant that Danzig, a thoroughly German city, and its deep-water port, should be ceded to Poland after the war. During the post-war negotiations, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George opposed Poland’s demand to take Danzig because its population was almost exclusively German. In a compromise, the Great Powers agreed that Danzig would become a “Free City” that would belong to neither Germany nor Poland, but both would have special rights in the city. The interwar status of Danzig was never clear: no one could agree whether it was a sovereign state, a state without sovereignty, a protectorate of Poland, or a protectorate of the League of Nations. The loss of Danzig — the so-called “Amsterdam of the East” — significantly wounded Germany’s national pride during the interwar period. It is not an exaggeration to compare it to wrenching Venice from Italy, Calais from France, or Manchester from England. For more than a year before the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939, negotiations over returning Danzig to Germany continued in what can only be described as a haphazard way: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland navigated German demands and Polish refusals intermixed with threats of war and war guarantees.

Polish intransigence over Danzig proved its — and eventually Germany’s — catastrophic downfall. The invasion of Poland is inextricably tied to its refusal to return Danzig, an overwhelming German city both demographically and historically, to Germany. Considering the misery endured by the Poles and the Germans — and considering further that World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history with, by some estimates, some seventy million people perishing, was such intransigence worth it? While it is beyond absurd to blame Poland for World War II, I have often wondered if Poland knew her fate in defying what was to many at the time as reasonable German demands. If she knew that she would be smashed and occupied by the Soviets and Nazis and then subjected to almost fifty years of iron-fisted Soviet rule thereafter, would she have acted as defiantly over Danzig?

Given the cataclysm that was World War II, the anti-war phrase, “Why die for Danzig?, popularized on the eve of World War II in a Parisian newspaper, proved to be more than prophetic. It reflected a widespread view that Danzig, as a historically German city, ought to be returned to Germany, and, in any event, a dispute over Danzig ought not to serve as the impetus for World War II. Setting aside German colonies seized after WWI and some scattered Germans living throughout Poland, Danzig represented the last major enclave of Germans left outside of the Reich that was cut off as a result of Versailles. Perhaps Hitler would have made yet still more demands for Germany if Poland had capitulated on the question of Danzig’s return to the Reich, but we will never know.

*         *         *         *

World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. Only ten days earlier, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact on August 23, 1939 — the public part of the pact provided for non-aggression between the powers; the non-public protocols divided up eastern Europe in Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence following the expected defeat of Poland. Two and a half weeks after the German invasion began from the West, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east on September 17, 1939, and the two powers essentially split the former country into two. Notably, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany for its invasion on September 3, 1939, but remained remarkably circumspect when the Soviets invaded Poland just weeks later. Without an eastern flank to worry about compliments of the German-Soviet Pact, Hitler took the step to launch the war without hesitation. In less than nine months following, Hitler would smash the Allied forces in the West in May 1940 — driving the British into a perilous and crushing retreat from Dunkirk and the French into a humiliating armistice after overrunning the country. By the summer of 1940, Hitler controlled or was allied with, virtually all of Western and Central Europe except the British Isles. The British, now fighting Germany alone, valiantly defended her home islands during the fall of 1940 in the Battle of Britain but continued to lose battles and ground to the Axis forces throughout the various theaters of the war. The success of the Germans pushed the British to the brink; had the war not broken out between the Germans and the Soviets during 1941 and had the Axis powers pivoted instead towards Persia and the lifeblood of oil for the British Empire, it is more than possible that Britain would have sued for peace given its perilous position. But Hitler’s monumental decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 strengthened Churchill’s resolve to continue the fight now that Germany would be engaged on two fronts. More than that, Germany’s decision decided the fate of Europe — and the world — for generations to come.

But even the step to attack the U.S.S.R. taken by the Germans is little understood. As a sidebar, one book that describes the Soviet-German conflict in a way that is both convincing and controversial is The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II by Viktor Suvorov, a former Soviet intelligence officer. Suvorov describes Operation Barbarossa as a preemptive defensive war by the Germans in response to an imminent invasion by the Soviets. Suvorov discredits the theory that Stalin was duped by Hitler or that the Soviet Union was a victim of Nazi aggression. Instead, he argues that Stalin neither feared Hitler nor mistakenly trusted him. He shows how Hitler’s intelligence services detected the Soviet Union’s massive preparations for war against Germany. This detection, he argues, led to Germany’s proactive war plan and the launch of an invasion of the Soviet Union. He argues that the reason the Soviets performed so poorly at the beginning of the war was because they were assembled, in mass with enormous numbers of troops and amounts of war material, on the Western border in preparation for an invasion. Hitler’s largely unexpected attack enveloped a massive force unprepared for a defensive war that was promptly encircled and annihilated. Suvorov goes so far as to claim that had the Germans not attacked and pushed the Soviets back as far as they did, all of Western Europe up to the Atlantic Ocean would have been behind the Iron Curtin.

Operation Barbarossa was the largest invasion force ever assembled and it initially demonstrated again the successes of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe — pushing the Soviets back to Moscow and Leningrad in the north and Stalingrad in the south. Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic countries were completely occupied by Axis forces. By the end of 1941, some 700,000 square miles of Soviet territory and almost six million Soviet POWs were in German hands. By the end of 1941, even with the American entry into World War II, a decisive German victory over the Soviet Union seemed not merely likely but almost certain.

For many reasons, not the least of which was the intoxicating spirit of victory and the opportunity to fight the menace of communism and the diabolical Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht in 1941 was an attractive prospect for young men throughout much of Western Europe — and hundreds of thousands of non-Germans joined and fought either in Wehrmacht or the Waffen SS. In addition, it is estimated that more than a million Soviet citizens fought in the German forces against the Soviet Union when allowed to escape the Soviet yoke. Parenthetically, the current crisis in Ukraine is, at least by some measures, a continuation of the resistance of the Western Ukrainians against the Russo-Soviets. Much as Vladimir Putin likes to point out, it is a fact that Stepan Bandera, leader of the Ukrainian nationalists during World War II, was a committed ally of the invading Germans and fought side-by-side with them against the Soviet Union. On January 22, 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko honored Stepan Bandera by posthumously bestowing on him the state honor, “Hero of Ukraine.” To describe Bandera as a blatant Nazi sympathizer is to put it mildly indeed.

Go to Part 2

[1] For those who are interested, Nos. 4–9 deal with immigration and citizenship and preserving citizenship to Germans alone; Nos. 10–18 deal with economic questions; Nos. 19–20 deal with education and children; Nos. 23–24 deal with the freedoms of religion and the press; and Nos. 21 and 25 address governmental and legal reforms.

More money, more sex, more status, more possessions, more gratification. That’s how too many people in the modern world would answer one simple question: “What would you like in your life?” When I asked myself that question, I was surprised by speed and naturalness with which the answer came to me: I’d like more stars and more butterflies.

Stealing the sky

To put it another way, I’d like more enchantment. Stars and butterflies are beautiful, mysterious, spirit-lifting, thought-provoking, and seemingly oblivious to human beings. They exist for their own sake. And yet what would they be without us? One summer I saw a bright rainbow across a field of horses. The rainbow was beautiful, heart-lifting, awe-inspiring. But the horses had their heads down, grazing. Horses don’t gaze at rainbows. Or follow the flight of a butterfly. And when night falls, horses don’t lift their heads in awe to a clear, star-jewelled sky. Nothing in the animal kingdom does, except for human beings.

Stars and trees seen from Luhasoo bog in Estonia (image from Wikipedia)

But fewer and fewer humans gaze at the stars and watch butterflies today, because light pollution drowns the night sky and butterflies have collapsed in numbers. I would say that light pollution has been the biggest crime in history. After all, it has stolen the sky from millions of people across whole continents. Reversing that enormous theft should be a priority of any serious and sane government. A clear sight of the night sky wouldn’t just restore to us the awe and majesty of the stars and moon: it would re-connect us with those long generations of our ancestors who watched and wondered and worshiped. There’s wisdom in the night. And brain-shaking power. Ancient Greek had the beautiful adverb ἀστέροθεν, asterothen, meaning “from the stars.” It also had the awesome adjective ἀστροβρόντης, astrobrontēs, meaning “star-thundering” and used of the god Mithras.

Poisoned by modernity

Modernity has stolen those ancient astral awes and inspirations from us, staining the night with light. And it’s stripped the day of another ancient source of beauty and otherness: those winged wonders known as butterflies. Reading A Curious Boy (2021), the autobiography of the British scientist Richard Fortey (born 1946), I was lost in wonder and envy at this description: “Small tortoiseshell butterflies, whose caterpillars feed on the common nettle, made orange clouds at the edges of fields.” (p. 65) He’s writing about the 1950s and goes on to say that, because nettles are now common: “Small tortoiseshells should be everywhere. Instead, [their] population has fallen by three-quarters in thirty years. The word ‘baffling’ has been used in official reports.” (p. 66)

Small tortoiseshell butterfly on the concrete of a car-park, Dorset, England (image from Wikipedia)

More nettles, fewer butterflies — baffling! But it isn’t truly baffling. It’s a poisonous by-product of modernity, of the industrialization of farming and the countryside. And it’s an excellent example of what the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) called die Entzauberung der Welt — “the disenchantment of the world” that accompanied the industrial revolution and the rise of modern science. Ironically enough, the very word “disenchantment” is an example of what you might call the disenchantment of the English language. Entzauberung is pure German, but English lost its native ways of talking about magic and now uses French. And to my ear “dis-” is an ugly, bureaucratic prefix.

Re-enchant the familiar

So “disenchantment” is disenchanted. Which is appropriate enough. But if we had a native way of expressing the concept — “untivering” uses the same roots as the German — we wouldn’t know what we were missing. As John Lennon once sang: “You don’t know what you’ve got till you lose it.” When Richard Fortey was a boy in the 1950s, he perhaps wasn’t as enchanted by the actual sight of “orange clouds” of tortoiseshells as some of us, in the butterfly-bereft 2020s, can be by the mere thought of them. Similarly, do native speakers of German rejoice in the richness and rootedness of words like Entzauberung? No. Most of them don’t. It’s simply the word for that concept in German. And are they delighted by the consonant cluster that begins the word Zauber, pronounced tsow-ber and meaning “magic”? Again, no. But I’m not a native speaker of German and I love the ts- of Zauber, zeitig, zierlich, meaning “magic,” “timely,” “delicate.” It sounds to me like a little bell tinkling.

If you call that twee, then fine: I love the consonant cluster tw- in English too. Or I’ve learned to love it: we can re-enchant the familiar and learn to delight in what we once took for granted. If you don’t know the adjective twee, it means “excessively sentimental, pretty or coy.” It may come from a childish pronunciation of “sweet” (I like the consonant cluster sw- too). Winnie the Pooh (1924) is twee. You could even say it’s toxically twee, in the case of the Disney adaptation. But that book by Kenneth Graham (1859–1932) was an attempt at the re-enchantment of the world, at the reversal of the industrialization and urbanization that began to trample on the world in the Victorian era. Here’s another attempt at re-enchantment by a greater writer:

But where a passion yet unborn perhaps
Lay hidden as the music of the moon
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale. (“Aylmer’s Field” [1864])

That’s Tennyson (1809-92), who could conjure more with ten words than lesser writers can with ten thousand. I think Tolkien was a lesser writer. But a greater maker. And, born later, he saw even more clearly the harm done by the iron hooves of modernity. And by its glaring, glowing eyes. That’s why two things were so important to Tolkien: the trees trampled by the hooves and the stars banished by the eyes. Trees and stars are central to Lord of the Rings (1954–55), Tolkien’s flawed but literally fabulous attempt at the re-enchantment of literature:

Away high in the East swung Remmirath, the Netted Stars, and slowly above the mists red Borgil rose, glowing like a jewel of fire. Then by some shift of airs all the mist was drawn away like a veil, and there leaned up, as he climbed over the rim of the world, the Swordsman of the Sky, Menelvagor with his shining belt. The Elves all burst into song. Suddenly under the trees a fire sprang up with a red light.

‘Come!’ the Elves called to the hobbits. ‘Come! Now is the time for speech and merriment!’ (The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [1954], Book 1, chapter 3, “Three Is Company”)

Menelvagor is the real constellation Orion, perhaps the most easily recognizable star-shape and surely the most awesome. Tolkien has sharpened my appreciation of Orion with that singing phrase “Swordsman of the Sky.” But Tolkien was a Christian and also knew the power of a single star. When the magi came from the east in the Gospel of Matthew, they were following one astera, one star. And when it brought them to the birthplace of Jesus, “they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.” Was that Christian star an inspiration for a later passage in Lord of the Rings, when the overlooked and despised hobbits Frodo and Sam are starved and despairing amid the thorns and rocks of Mordor, poisoned realm of the Dark Lord Sauron? I think it must have been:

The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. (The Lord Of The Rings: The Return of the King [1955], Book 2, chapter 6, “Mount Doom”)

We can say the same of Clown World: it’s a small and passing thing. Its ugliness and evil will not endure. Starlight and the music of the moon will outshine and outsing the cacophoty and cacophony of modernity.