Up the Down Steppes

By * Melvin Maddocks

THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER by Guy Safer. Translated from the French by Lily Emmet. 465 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

If the ultimate snobbery is the snobbery of pain, the ultimate snob may be the vanquished German soldier--Siegfried, in the agony of defeat, singing a prouder tenor than his enemies can manage in victory.

In the autumn of 1942, Guy Sajer, 16, the French-speaking son of a German mother, cockily double-timed into Russia to help recharge the Third Reich's blitzkrieg on the steppes. Less than two years later he staggered out half alive with the remnant of the once-elite Gross Deutschland Division. Even in this debacle he has found--25 years later--an eminence to lay claim to. He is an elitist in surviving hardships.

"I have never met anyone better able to stand punishment than the Germans," Sajer writes. Obviously he believes that Germans never took more punishment than in the Russian campaign. His self defined mission: "To reanimate with all the intensity I can summon those distant cries from the slaughterhouse."

But blood-and-guts reportage is not enough to explain why The Forgotten Soldier has been a bestseller in France and Germany, or why Sajer so belatedly wrote it. Beneath its artillery-barrage surface hides another war--the struggle, equally intense though never acknowledged, between an autobiographer's impulse to confess and his impulse to self-justify. With a kind of death grip, Sajer holds on to his reader, simultaneously appealing to him for absolution and denying his right to judge. He pictures the reader sitting in an armchair by the fire, curled up in a comfortably moral position. Out of anguish, out of arrogance, he pulls him down into his hell. What he is finally saying is: Don't judge me, be me.

Despite a Teutonic tendency to grandiloquence and repetition, Sajer is brutally effective. He puts lice on that armchair reader, gives him an empty belly, and sticks him in a frozen mudhole. He loses him in the endless space of that "accursed Russian plain." He makes him feel the ache of the Russian winter, 35-40DEG below zero--the temperature at which, when a soldier urinated, three or four of his fellows thrust their cracked hands under the stream for momentary warmth.

Sajer crams the reader into a truck next to a living corpse with his head half blown off. refusing to die. He makes him hold down a man's leg while a surgeon saws it off. He forces him to wait in a trench while waves of Russians charge, shouting "Ourrah!" until fear "reduced every conviction to nothing."

The places have names: Belgorod, Kharkov, Kiev. Catastrophe follows catastrophe. But finally, like war itself, The Forgotten Soldier obliterates time and space into a pure throbbing pain whose only limit is death or madness.

Yet the book is far from a tract for pacifism. If Sajer has created a hell worthy of Dante, his reaction to it is curiously mixed. "Peace has brought me many pleasures," he writes, "but nothing as powerful as that passion for survival in wartime, that faith in love, and that sense of absolutes. It often strikes me with horror that peace is really extremely monotonous. During the terrible moments of war one longs for peace with a passion that is painful to bear. But in peacetime one should never, even for an instant, long for war!"

The book's most unconvincing passages occur when Sajer, on Berlin leave, falls in love with a little rose-and-cream operetta type named Paula. He is far more credible when he writes of buddies like the huge, permanently hungry Hals: "We discovered a comradeship which I have never found again."

Sajer can write flowery asides to the non-German civilian: "Shall I ever deserve pardon? . . . Can I ever forget?" But his real peer group then--and now --is that absolutely disciplined iron man, the German soldier. As an Alsatian (he even wrote his memoir in French), he admires with the special fervor of the semi-outsider.

When he met the Americans, he scorned them for their casualness. Their uniforms were "like golfing clothes," they chewed gum "like ruminating animals" and, worst of all German sins, they were "indifferent to their victory."

The Forgotten Soldier is finally the account of a disastrous love affair with war and with the army that, of all modern armies, most loved war. Though the affair ended badly, there has been nothing to rival it in the three decades since. Permanently Gefreiter Sajer, G., 100/1010 G4., permanently disqualified for peace, he is a soul as devastated as a Russian battlefield and he knows it. He concludes: "I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition"--an elitist in defeat as he surely would have been in victory. But to his reader, this Sajer, doomed to survival, may be as moving an argument against war as all the corpses he unflinchingly bears witness to.

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