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This book was put into my hands by a veteran of the campaign in Burma, a particularly nasty theatre of the Second World War. ‘You’ll never read a better book about being an ordinary soldier. Pity they were Nazis.’ I read it with awe at what human beings can stand, and rereadings have not dulled my reactions. Many books are written about war, few by the men who do the bloody work. We are far here from the balanced reports of war correspondents, from the plans of generals, let alone the demented schemes for world conquest of Stalin and Hitler.

Guy Sajer, not yet seventeen, with a French father and a German mother – a First World War alliance – fell in love with military excellence, as he puts it, and joined Hitler’s armies. He then had to become all German, and fought with the German armies into and across Russia, retreated, pursued by the Russians and, starving, the only one left alive of his comrades, was advised by a kindly French officer that since his mother was German, not his father – which would have meant him becoming a prisoner – he could join the French administration supervising the collapse of Germany. The German boy, twenty years old, had to reverse his efforts to suppress his French self, was fed and clothed and rehabilitated – his body, not his mind – but not surprisingly became very ill. Which reminds me of a friend who, having survived four years of horror in a Japanese prison camp, people dying all around him of starvation and disease, arrived skeletal but healthy in England, but nearly died of a mild flu.

Could there be an apter symbol of Europe, of Europe’s mingled and mangled fates, than this young man? Or a more painfully racked person than Guy Sajer at the Victory Celebrations in Paris, which celebrated the defeat of his Germany, reciting under his breath the names of his dead comrades whose heroism was certainly not being applauded that day, and who were soon to be deliberately forgotten by the new Germany who had to find them an embarrassment?

Years ago I was told that this Guy Saje. r was living in Paris, solitary, and bitter that the men, or rather, boys – we have to remind ourselves that we are reading about 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds – had never been credited for their bravery. He has consecrated his life to bearing witness, says that as far as any personal life is concerned, he was burned out. This book could have been called ‘A Dead Man Bears Witness’. I think he would have approved. A person may flare like a match and be left a blackened twisted wraith of himself.

They started off, as young men do, high on adventure and patriotism. Sieg Heils and Heil Hitlers are recorded but not made much of. The cloudy patriotic idealism of Nazism does emerge in the speeches of officers trying to justify the war, and Sajer records that he rebuked comrades for lapses in patriotism. What immediately emerges as a major theme is that soldier’s preoccupation, food. These youths, at an age when no amount of food can ever be enough, were on rations, and it all gets worse as the war goes on and Germany frays apart: ersatz food, ersatz clothes, and the supply convoys uncertain, or not coming at all. These always hungry young men were fighting like wolves, on air, sometimes for days, then weeks at a time.

The author says that we, sitting comfortably and reading his words in safety, can never understand what he is describing. That is true. ‘I cannot find words to describe what I saw. Words and syllables were perfected to describe unimportant things.’ This plea to our imaginations repeats throughout his pages.

A comparison presents itself: Solzhenitsyn’s 1914, that account of the confusions of war, masses of men being moved about, chaos everywhere, no one knowing what is going on. These soldiers, making impossible sacrifices, urged on by officers to find in themselves yet another ounce of effort, thought they were supplying the soldiers fighting at Stalingrad, but that front had collapsed. They were being killed in their thousands to support men already dead or taken prisoner. And the tale is told again, again; when the German front was collapsing everywhere and the Russians advancing, Sajer and his mates were making efforts to retake a certain sector. Starving and in rags, they were met by starving men in rags. ‘Our shock at meeting our combat troops in such a state was equal to theirs finding us as we were.’ Two officers confer: ‘Where do you think you are going … what are you talking about … what sector, what hill? – are you dreaming? There is nothing left, do you hear me? Nothing but mass graves which are blowing apart in the wind.’ ‘You can’t be serious … you are a little light in the head and you are hungry. We, too, have been keeping ourselves alive by miracles.’ ‘Yes, I’m hungry, hungry in a way the saints could not have imagined. I’m hungry and I’m sick and I am afraid. I feel like devouring you. There were cases of cannibalism in Stalingrad and soon there will be here too.’

An account of the battle to take a position at Belgorod, ten days of fighting, which Sajer rightly says it is impossible to imagine, must surely be a classic of war. They took it and then the Russians retook it. A third of the German soldiers were killed. Futility, unless heroism is its own justification – and what else can soldiers believe, when there is nothing to show for such efforts? ‘There is no sepulchre for the Germans killed in Russia. One day some mujik will turn over their remains and plough them under as fertiliser and sow his furrow with sunflower seed.’

There are rewards of insight into the human condition which it seems the author only too painfully understands.

The famous regiment, Gross Deutschland, for which Sajer volunteered, was trained by a certain Herr Hauptman. We may have read, or seen, how raw youths in this army or that are bullied and bludgeoned into being good soldiers, but all these accounts are like the descriptions of first days in infant school compared with the regime of Herr Hauptman, which we read disbelieving. He killed four men and incapacitated others, and at the finish this sadist said he felt satisfied with his men and with himself. ‘It seems scarcely possible that by the time we left we all nourished a certain admiration for Herr Hauptman. Everyone in fact dreamed of someday becoming an officer of the same stripe.’

There is a key question that has to nag and intrude. Nowhere, not once, are Jews mentioned. Yet we know how Hitler’s armies were ordered to treat Jews. Is it likely that Gross Deutschland did not follow Hitler’s orders, or had not heard of them? There are accounts of cruelties by the German side and by the Russians. Both killed or abandoned prisoners and the wounded, sometimes their own. There are also incidents showing compassion. A starving soldier rescued a bottle of half-sour milk that was the only food of a baby, only to be killed by enraged comrades. But never a mention of Jews. What are we to believe? Yet there are surprises you would think were impossible. Throughout the Ukraine in the early days of the war the Germans were welcomed as deliverers, fed, given shelter, found girlfriends, among people who hated the communists. Captured partisans shouted that they were anti-communist and on the same side as the Germans. But here is another surprise. The Germans did not seem to hate the Popovs, the Ivans, the Russkies, as much as they did the partisans, who aroused in Sajer paroxysms of hate. They were unfair, played dirty, were treacherous and generally disgusting. No mercy for partisans, only loathing. There is no end to the sheer irrationality of – well, of us, of humans.

‘Russian excesses do not in any way excuse us for the excesses of our own side. War always reaches depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.’

The long finale of this account of every kind of excess is the retreat into Germany, before the Russian armies. No food. Uniforms in rags. One after another Sajer’s friends were killed. ‘To watch a friend die is like dying oneself.’

And in the middle of this long nightmare notes of pure farce. If Sajer and his comrades hated the partisans, they hated even more their own military police, who would appear fresh and fed to punish half-crazed men more dead than alive just emerged from days of battle – for having lost a bit of equipment.

Soldiers who had not eaten for days and could hardly stand, saw an abandoned supply vehicle and raided it. Two were hanged by the police with a label around their necks, ‘I am a thief and a traitor to my country.’

The battles to preserve bridgeheads along the Baltic and North Sea coasts so that refugees and surviving soldiers could be taken off in boats were as terrible as any that had gone before. At last Sajer was rescued and became French, repeating under his breath the names of dead comrades who by now would be old men honoured in anniversary Victory parades if the infamous history of Hitler’s Barbarossa permitted it.