When I read about this review in a 2010 WSJ article, I could sense that it was going to be a terrible story. The lonely outpost of a single tank buried in the earth surrounded by the open plains. My favorite part was as he wondered around the steppes of western Ukraine with no front line and troops randomly encountered one another in the dark and snow.
It's easy to question if he remembered everything so clearly and with novelistic description but it's not too important because it rings true.
This part of the story is not often told.The writing is dense with detail and incident. No wonder Germany collapsed it's soldiers were abused and when they complained hung up from a tree. We tend to think of the Germans as "supermen" but Sajer is just a normal person stressed to the utmost degree. But it runs deeper, Sajer's voice has an innocence and normality in contrast to the insanity of the situation. Of course it's visceral, mutilated corpses. Sajer leaves no bones unturned in describing the horrors of war. The Forgotten Soldier is a stunning book, which is to say one leaves leave it feeling traumatized after a long nightmare. Sajer's perspective as a German foot soldier makes The Forgotten Soldier a unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitor said "may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited." A work of stunning force, this is an unforgettable reminder of the horrors of war.
As the biting cold of the Russian winter sets in, and the tide begins to turn against the Germans, life becomes an endless round of pounding artillery attacks and vicious combat against a relentless and merciless Red Army. Posted to the elite Grosse Deutschland division, with its sadistic instructors who shoot down those who fail to make the grade, he enters a violent and remorseless world where all youthful hope is gradually ground down, and all that matters is the brute will to survive. However, he quickly finds that for the foot soldier the glory of military success hides a much harsher reality of hunger, fatigue, and constant deprivation. When Guy Sajer joins the infantry full of ideals in the summer of 1942, the German army is enjoying unparalleled success in Russia.
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