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.

From The Forgotten Soldier (1965), a German soldier Guy Sajer's account from the Eastern Front during World War II. Sajer's relationship to war was rather ambiguous but you can guess it's importance from the fact that the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College considers it to be an accurate roman à clef and still retains it on its recommended reading list for World War II while it also figures among books recommended by the Commandant of the United States Marines Corps. Some people consider the book "anti-war" but it remains a fascinating tale of soldiers caught up in events bigger than themselves. Guy Sajer - of course, it's a pseudonym - said he just wanted to write about "my innermost emotional experiences" and was not bothered about chronology, situations, dates, and unimportant details.