Forgotten Soldier Warped by War:

Forgotten Soldier

Warped by War:

A Review of Guy Sajer's the Forgotten Soldier

Though it has recently been plagued by accusations of historical inaccuracy, the Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer remains for many readers a fascinating and rare account of World War II from the viewpoint of a German soldier. Beyond its value as a war narrative, the memoir also serves as a psychological study of the effects of war on the worldview of a young teenager. Only sixteen years old when he joined the German army, Sajer had a typical youthful vision of war as a heroic adventure full of danger and glory. As the book proceeds, however, this romantic fantasy is replaced by disgust, disillusionment, and cynicism. Whether or not Sajer was able to represent the facts of war accurately, there is no doubt that he was able to give a painfully precise account of its effect on the human spirit.

In his own preface to the memoir, Sajer laid out in broad strokes who he was before the war and how it changed him in the end. In one especially poignant moment, he said that he "married [the war] because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love" (Sajer, preface). The romanticism ended, however, on a day "when [he] should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important" (Sajer, preface). This transition from romantic to cynic can be traced through a few pivotal points in Sajer's narrative.

The first experience that begins to wear away Sajer's sense of the glories of war occurs when he is on the train to Minsk shortly after joining the German forces. On an adjacent train he sees a sight that makes him "freeze…with horror," (Sajer, p. 20) -- train cars loaded with piles of the Russian dead, with living Russian prisoners huddled behind for warmth. Any young man's first encounter with death on a massive scale is sure to have an impact on his psyche, but Sajer's experience is made even more jarring by his pleasant encounter with Russian prisoners earlier in his military training. Even though they were the enemy, Sajer had already recognized the Russians as fellow human beings, so the sight of so many of their lifeless and frozen bodies was enough to leave him "overcome by a vast sense of disgust" (Sajer, p. 21).

This horror at the reality of death becomes even more profound when Sajer witnesses the death of his friend Ernst. As Ernst bleeds to death from a grotesque face wound, Sajer frantically appeals to God: "Save Ernst, God…Show yourself" (Sajer, p. 94). But the appeal is worthless. Ernst dies slowly, painfully, and without the slightest bit of hope or comfort. Sajer is appalled, and his sense of the moral justice of the world begins to crumble: "The man struggled with death, and the adolescent struggled with despair, which is close to death. And God, who watches everything, did nothing" (Sajer, p. 94). At this moment, he crosses a threshold of hopelessness from which he would never be able to return.

Even romantic love, one of the most powerful forces in the adolescent soul, is unable to save Sajer from his spiral into darkness. While stopped in Berlin, he meets a young woman named Paula, and the two of them fall briefly but intensely in love. Sajer, however, cannot reconcile these feelings of tenderness with the violence of his world: "I thought of Ernst, of all the tears of this war, and all the anguish…My happiness was mixed with too much suffering. I couldn't simply accept it and forget all the rest" (Sajer, p. 150). Instead of filling him with giddiness and hope like most teenagers in love, Sajer's short affair only serves to darken his worldview more, and his parting from Paula is as wrenching to him as any of the horrors of battle. Though he promises to return to her, the war "prevented [him] from keeping his word, and the peace made it lose all its value" (Sajer, p. 154).

The final and most irrevocable moment in Sajer's path from youthful innocence to bitter disillusionment and despair comes towards the end of his tenure in the German ranks, when he and a comrade are surrounded by Russians without any apparent means of escape. By now, Sajer is in a position of command, and finds himself unable to act. He is so completely devoid of hope that he loses even the basic instinct for self-preservation and begs his comrade to kill him. His comrade is in a similar state of despair and makes the same request of Sajer, trapping them in a "grotesque dilemma" (Sajer, p. 410). Neither ends up granting the wish of the other, and Sajer must remain alive to ponder the desperation of his situation and his utter inability to act as a leader: "I was no longer trying to see where our danger might be coming from, but was turned inward, on myself. I found nothing but despair" (Sajer, p. 411). By this point in the narrative, Sajer barely qualifies as a human being, and has certainly lost any semblance of youth. His cavalier attitude towards ending his life and his lack of any sense of self besides failure show him to be only a shell of a man, and the reader wonders whether any redemption or return to human nature is possible.