The Forgotten Soldier

War is a breeding ground for fear, and fear in turn is a sharp strangler of innocence and moral structure. This is Guy Sajer's experience--rather than a war of man reaching unimagined peaks of bravery, his account of WWII in his memoir, The Forgotten Soldier, is a bombardment of confusion, terror, and uncertainty. One of his most striking images of the nature of war and its impact on the human condition is captured, ironically, not in any atrocity imparted on a fellow soldier or refugee, but rather in the briefly mentioned, marginal demise of an animal. During an anxious two-day wait for passage off the Hela Peninsula, Sajer chooses to provide only one anecdote, which turns out to be one of his most potent:

There were two more attempted Russian air raids. The last victim I was to see was a dirty white horse.

A Russian plane had been hit, and was disintegrating above us. We all watched as the forward part of the plane, whose racing engine gave off a long howl, plunged toward the ground. The noise terrified the animal, which slipped its collar and galloped, whinnying, toward the spot where the roaring mass of metal would land. It must have taken about three steps before it was hit Its flesh was scattered for over fifteen yards in all directions.

The white horse's death is gruesome and disturbing, even through the eyes of a German soldier in the face of the destruction of an enemy aircraft. It is an image that evokes a sense of chaotic symmetry: good and bad intermingled--both manifested as types of destruction, the disintegration of the plane fatefully met with the explosion of the animal. Heroism, valor or victory are irrelevant factors in this scenario. It ends up simply being a big, bloody mess. This poetical last casualty that Sajer witnesses punctuates his entire view of war: It is hard, fast and devastating. The horse, a representation of Sajer's own inner strength and spirit, sullied and bedraggled as it already was, is unable to survive the war. Most importantly, it is its sudden reaction to fear that sends it racing toward its own demise. By writing all of his war account in such a blunt and immediate way Sajer avoids the gloss of retrospect, showing us instead the impossibility of a soldier in the midst of fighting to even be thinking about what he is fighting for, or how courageously he is fighting for it. Instead he presents the hard notion that war itself is the invading enemy on the human spirit, and fear its vanguard.

Throughout the book we are shown several ways in which the fear that war provokes is extremely detrimental to Sajer and his comrades, one of which being its physiological effects. In one of the book's characteristically candid, uncensored passages of inter-soldier dialogue, one of Sajer's comrades, Wollers, exclaims that he has "had enough of giving orders, and sweating, and shitting in [his] pants like a baby when [he's] scared." Sajer also provides a kind of general physical description of the vanquishing of one's spirit, as caused "when danger continues indefinitely." As he explains it, "one collapses into an unbearable madness, and a crisis of nerves and tears is only the beginning. Finally, one vomits and collapses, entirely brutalized and inert, as if death had already won." Prolonged exposure to fear and danger leads to a tangible, observable series of symptoms that can best be described as the body giving up on life. This state exists independently of the squalor of wartime living and the numerous physical dangers that a given campaign might include--they are purely psychosomatic in nature, inspired not by the specifics of warfare but by the illusive "harassing fear" that it spawns.

The idea of a death-before-death seems to be the primary consequence of the soldiering life in Sajer's opinion. The exploded white horse is a foreshadow for his own premature death of spirit--which had already been pushed to the limit so many times--caused by the separation from his best