Reading from the 1990 Brassey’s Edition, NY, 465

What struck me the most about this memoir, by a French grunt fighting in the Germany Army against the Soviet Union, was the evacuation from Danzig as every German in Prussia tried to make it to Denmark—where the German grunts found to their surprise that the English, Americans and French did not like them! The Danzig evacuation passages fit well with the account I read in Iron Cross Sniper on the Eastern Front.

Guy Sager was 18 when he volunteered to fight the “Bolsheviks,” and he never seems to have forgotten his naïve self, although, once returned to France, he and his kin had to forget that young man, what he had done, where he had been, and the horrendous suffering he was a part of. Perhaps, in this way, he suffered to bring us this book. Guy's narrative style is at once humble and heart-wrenching.

With the postmodern view of WWII as Star Wars, with the Nazi military machine as the Evil Empire: larger, more advanced, and totally mechanized compared to its Ewok-like victims, a reading of Russian Front memoirs by German combatants gives a shockingly opposite picture, with Krauts getting around on horses and slogging forever on foot, facing vast herds of rolling Russian steel monsters. Guy spends all of page 63 discussing the use of horses in the Russian snow. Horses are working and dying throughout the entire mechanical conflict. The soldiers have a tiny, myopic existence, crawling on the verge of a terrible end.

Guy was a regular soldier, had flunked out of the Luftwaffe and attained no great distinction as a ground combatant, but survived, managing to return to his mother in time to carry her home, where his picture still rested above votive flowers.

Images of horses—loyal, striving, dying, hung in trees to be butchered to feed the doomed men—haunt the story.

“I can still see the three plucky ponies jumping through the snow like rabbits.”

Perhaps the most brutal account was of Guy’s unit discovering that Russian peasants had murdered their wounded. They were shaking with a manic need for vengeance but restrained themselves, all of them sick of death and killing. This was the most brutal of wars, with none of the horrors visited upon the Russian people by the rear echelon Nazi butchers surpassing the tortures inflicted upon wounded Germans by those very civilians. The worst had to be placing the feet of wounded men in a water trough and letting it freeze into a block, with accompanying mutilations and tortures more gruesome than anything done to a white Pennsylvania slave by a Delaware war party 200 years earlier.

During the evacuation from Danzig, the last death he witnessed—after crowded children are spattered into a steaming mess—was that of a dirty white horse hit by a falling plane. By that time, in April of 1945, the men new that the officers lied to them as a matter of course and soldiered on with no alternative but a passive death.

When the better men of a “fatherland” clashed with the more numerous men of a “motherland” the gods of war ultimately sided with the motherland, possibly the most dysgenic clash of peoples in history, but with a handful of survivors with enough of their mind intact to tell their terrible tales. Of these, Guy Sager’s is the most touching.

I’d like to thank Mister Bob Mergehan for the permanent loan of this enlightening book.