The Forgotten Soldier

Author’s Preface

Guy Sajer… who are you?

My parents were country people, born some hundreds of miles apart — a distance filled with difficulties, strange complexities, jumbled frontiers, and sentiments which were equivalent but untranslatable.

I was produced by this alliance, straddling this delicate combination, with only one life to deal with its manifold problems.

I was a child, but that is without significance. The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.

I had to shoulder a brutally heavy burden. Suddenly there were two flags for me to honor, and two lines of defense — the Siegfried and the Maginot — and powerful external enemies. I entered the service, dreamed, and hoped. I also knew cold and fear in places never seen by Lilli Marlene.

A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important.

So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.