The Forgotten Soldier is one of the best war memoirs I've read. An account of a Guy Sajer, a German soldier who joined the Wehrmacht in 1941- the worst possible timing.

After training, Sajer is assigned to a supply battalion on the Russian front. They arrive just before the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942.

Sajer is soon transferred to a combat division. The next three years (1942-1945) are a continuous sequence of defeat and bloody retreat. The book overflows with carnage, death and cruelty.

"Ernst", I said. "I'm going to bandage you. Don't cry."

I was insane. Ernst wasn't crying: I was. His coat was covered with blood. With the dressings in my hand, I stared at my friend. He must have been hit in the lower jaw. His teeth were mixed with fragments of bone, and through the gore I could see the muscles of his face contracting, moving what was left of his features.

In a state of near shock, I tried to put the dressing somewhere on that cavernous wound. When this proved impossible, I pushed a needle into the tube of morphine, and jabbed ineffectually through the thickness of cloth. Crying like a small boy, I pushed my friend to the other end of the seat, holding him in my arms, and soaking in his blood. Two eyes opened, brilliant with anguish, and looked at me from his ruined face.

"Ernst!" I laughed through my tears. "Ernst!"

He slowly lifted his hand and put it on my forearm. Half choked with emotion, I started the truck, and managed to begin moving without too great a jolt.

For a quarter of an hour, I drove through a web of ruts with one eye on my friend. His grip on my arm tightened and eased in proportion to his pain, and his death rattle rose and fell, sometimes louder than the noise of the truck.

Every prisoner caught robbing a German body was immediately shot. There were no official firing squads for these executions. An officer would simply shoot the offender on the spot, or hand him over to a couple of toughs who were regularly given this sort of job. Once, to my horror, I saw one of these thugs tying the hands of three prisoners to the bars of a gate. When his victims had been secured, he stuck a grenade into the pocket of one of their coats, pulled the pin, and ran for shelter. The three Russians, whose guts were blown out, screamed for mercy until the last moment.

Although we had already met birds of every color, these proceedings revolted us so much that violent arguments broke out between us and these criminals every time. They invariably became furious and abusive, shouting insults at us. They said the had escaped from the camp at Tomvos, where the Russians dumped German prisoners, and they told us how our countrymen were being slaughtered. According to them, Tomvos was an extermination camp. One bowl of millet was provided for every four men. There was never enough, even for the prisoners who could work. The daily surplus were simply killed: a favorite method of execution was to hammer an empty cartridge case into the nape of the prisoners neck. It seemed that the Russians often distracted themselves with this type of sport.

I myself can well believe that the Russians were capable of this kind of cruelty, after seeing them at work among the pitiful columns of refugees in East Prussia. But Russian excesses did not in any way excuse us for the excesses by our own side. War always reaches the depths of horror because idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.

"Our Panzers!"

A second later, a huge tank rolled over the ground we had occupied, crushing the barbed wire beneath its treads. In no time, it had crossed the trench, which was overflowing with the bodies of Russian soldiers. Then a second and a third tank plunged through the bloody paste, and rolled on, their treads stuck with horrible human remnants. Our noncom gave an involuntary cry of horror at the sight.

What happened next? There is nothing more than the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, which carry from one moment of nausea to another.

And then there are the cries of officers and noncoms, trying to shout across the cataclysm to regroup their sections and companies. That is how we took part in the German advance, being called through the noise and dust, following the clouds churned up by our tanks to the northern outskirts of Belgorod. All resistance was overwhelmed, and once again everything was either German or dead, and a sea of Russian soldiers had drawn back into the limitless confines of their country.

The Russians, who had broken through further south, neglected our sector. There was no need for them to take any more losses pursuing an enemy who was withdrawing anyway. The Red Army left our harassment to the partisans, whose numbers were continuously increasing, and which soon reached proportions astonishing in a country nominally under our control. On Stalin's orders, they intensified the desperation of our retreat with sudden ambushes; shells with delayed-action fuses; booby-trapped and mutilated bodies of men from interior positions; attacks on supply trains, isolated groups and rallying points; hideous mutilation of prisoners; and a constant refusal of contact with units capable of fighting.

The partisans -- or terrorists, a name they richly deserved -- always took on the easy victims, and greatly intensified the usual cruelties of wartime. By these means, they achieved an effect which the regular army was never able to equal.

The Wehrmacht bent before the power of an incomparably greater enemy. The unbearable harassment by partisans was added to the overwhelming and heroic rigors of the front, while our territories in the rear no longer guaranteed any repose to our exhausted troops. The Ukraine, which had shown some sympathy for us, was itself pillaged by partisan bands -- on orders from Moscow. The Ukrainian population had to choose, and be actively for one side or another. The partisans either killed or enlisted the young Ukrainians who had until then been so respectful to us. The invisible war triumphed: war which no longer offered any retreat, or calm, or pity. Men killed for revenge, in reprisal for what has happened, or might happen.