The Forgotten Soldier

Sajer and his fellow soldiers ultimately find their purpose in the company of one another, rather than the cause they are ostensibly serving or the home they imagine themselves defending. After his first real test in battle, Sajer communicates this idea clearly: “Looking back on everything that happened, I cannot regret having belonged to a combat unit. We discovered a sense of comradeship which I have never found again, inexplicable and steady, through thick and thin” (113). The experience of war, whether the endless drudgery of marches and patrols, fighting off cold and hunger for endless stretches, and then the living nightmare of combat, places who experience those things together in a class by themselves. The intensity of shared feeling from having survived, and the inability to communicate the full truth to those without similar experiences, produces a unique bond among Sajer and his comrades.

The most important comrade of all is Hals, who is astonishingly at Sajer’s side at so many key moments, an acerbic but also boisterous companion who somehow manages to hang onto a measure of joy amidst the worst of circumstances. Hals is a connection to a world of happiness and joviality which every other aspect of life seems to foreclose. This makes it noteworthy that as Sajer is bringing his narrative to a close, it is not the memories of death, destruction, cold, but rather of friends, dead, alive, and unknown, whose memories still provide a flicker of joy in a postwar world he can barely comprehend.

However, there is a dark counterpart to soldierly comradeship. War does not produce comradeship among civilians who have suffered together, as Sajer sees in Ukraine. Rather, it produces bitter divisions, fractured loyalties, and endless cycles of revenge. While the Ukrainians initially support the German invasion, the landscape changes once the Soviets gain the upper hand:

[T]he Ukrainian population had to choose, and be actively for one side or another. The partisans either killed or enlisted the young Ukrainians who had until then been so respectful to us. The invisible war triumphed: war which no longer offered any retreat, or calm, or pity. Wars of subversion have no face” (332).

As Sajer observes here, the circumstances that bind soldiers together, and often induce respect for the soldiers of the other side, turn neighbor against neighbor, family against family.