With all the wild and deadly things going on these days it's always nice to read a book that puts you in a better frame of mind. Something heartwarming and uplifting, that makes everything seem not quite so bad. One of these days I'll have to actually try that myself.
Instead, I read The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer, a horribly fascinating account of a brutal, terrible, and deadly time. Guy Sajer (actually a pen name for Guy Mouminoux) was born to a French father and a German mother and grew up in Alsace, one of the regions in France that the Germans periodically confiscated. 13 years old when the Germans again confiscated them in 1940, he soon found himself in the Wehrmacht at the ripe old age of 16. The book starts there and covers his experiences of the war on the Eastern Front, first in a supply unit and then as a combat infantryman. With only a few brief exceptions that is where he remains until the very end of the war when he is evacuated to Germany and surrenders to the British.
Don't think that counts as a spoiler, the book is really not about historical minutia so much as it is the experience of war. While combat plays a large role it is also about the experience of that long retreat, of being in a disintegrating army, of hunger, anxiety, and terror. Of the emotional conflict of being torn between two countries and finding yourself on the losing side of a conflict fought with the utmost viciousness.
Here in the US the firsthand accounts of World War II are overwhelmingly about the western front, I sought out The Forgotten Soldier as a partial remedy to that. As I was reading it I couldn't help but notice all the parallels to the current conflict in that neck of the woods. I wonder how many teenagers from Luhansk, Donetsk, or Crimea have lived through or died from a similar experience? Many of the locations mentioned in the book are quite familiar from Russia's current invasion of Ukraine, albeit with some different spellings.
People at peace with themselves have no idea that anyone unaccustomed to happiness shouts himself breathless in the face of joy.
That sentence jumped out at me as I read, gives you a sense of the author's perspective and experience. Was definitely a bit jarring to read of the Wehrmacht and the SS portrayed with a "our guys" perspective. By and large the author makes little attempt to glorify or apologize for the events he was involved in, instead seeking to give the reader some sense of what that involvement was like to experience.
Per Wikipedia The Forgotten Soldier is considered to be a roman à clef, 'a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction,' and is on the recommended reading lists of the US Army Command and General Staff College and the Commandant of the Marine Corps.
Don't know how appealing this book will be to the casual reader but if you fancy yourself a history buff or have an interest in World War II I recommend checking it out. Judging by the prices for it on Amazon it has been out of print for a while but if you would like to read it for free, the Internet Archive has it here. That's enough out of me, give me a holler if you give it a read.
Don't have a good image for the book so I made one with MidJourney.
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