The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer: book revi

The Forgotten Soldier: War on the Russian Front – A True Story (1971, this edition 2013) is set in Poland and Russia from September 1942-1945. This is the memoir of 17-year-old German soldier Gefreiter (Guy) Sajer who has a German mother, and French father.

It begins in November 1945, a bitterly cold winter with temperatures at minus 22C in Kharkov (‘during the years 1941, 1942, and 1943 Kharkov was taken by our army, retaken by the Russians, taken back by the Germans, and then finally retaken by the Russians. At this particular moment, our troops were holding it for the first time’). ‘The punishment we suffered, not at the hands of the Russian Army, which until that moment had done almost nothing except retreat, but from the cold, is almost beyond the powers of description.’ He’d aready seen piles of dead bodies. This was before he had to assist at a surgeon amputate another soldier’s leg.

His 12 days of leave in Berlin in 1943 included breaking the news to a mother of a fallen soldier – his friend – as well as a reunion with his father, and a new love, before his return to the war at the Southern Front. But by September ‘we died by the thousands that autumn on the Ukrainian plain.’

He describes hellish conditions – fierce fighting, injuries, diseases, fever, foot conditions, gastric problems, poor sanitation, sleeplessness, vomit, diarrhea, cold, frostbite, hunger, depression, shellshock, anxiety, weakness, deafness, and lice – as he fought in the battles from Kursk to Kharkov.

His memoir finishes with ‘Our Last Battle’ in Pillau and the ‘overflowing’ stream of refugees, and his return home.

This is an honest account of a young man’s excitement at the beginning of an adventure that swiftly turns to fear, tears, and moments of madness. Great book!

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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