This is what war looked like from the losing perspective—although even such stories were told by survivors and thus transmitted only a part of the terror that must have been involved. Dead men, as the cliché goes, tell no tales.
Soldiers rarely spared any thoughts for those wounded. This is one of the few exceptions from the protocols:
ABLER: What did they do when the first wounded men arrived from RUSSIA; what did they do to those who were half crippled or had been shot in the head; what did they do to them? Do you know what they did to them in the hospitals? They gave them something so that by the next day they were put to sleep; they did that in scores of cases, specially those coming back from FRANCE or from RUSSIA.
KUCH: They went out as sound men to defend their fatherland, had bad luck, were shot in the head or something, became completely incapacitated, and (they said) they are eating the bread out of our mouths, they can’t do any more good, they will have to be looked after all their lives, men like that have no need to live—so that’s the end of them. They died on the quiet—died of wounds! A thing like that will be avenged; the English don’t need to avenge it, the Supreme Power will take vengeance.313
This dialogue not only shows what the soldiers considered to be in the realm of the possible. It also hints at the fears which they maintained but could only be discussed in stories about the fates of others. This was apparently one way to express one’s feelings without talking about them directly.
War does not just consist of violence perpetrated and witnessed—the shooting down of planes, the gunning down of enemies, rape, plunder, and mass murder. It also consists of violence suffered. Yet that category carries far less communicative weight among soldiers, and different individuals experience it in different ways. Life during wartime is differentiated and multifaceted. How soldiers experience war depends on factors like place, rank, time, weaponry, and camaraderie. Empirically speaking, what we conceive as the total experience of war can be broken down into a kaleidoscope of diverse, more or less happy or terrible experiences and actions. War is only a total experience insofar as the group, commando, or unit forms the social frame for what soldiers have to endure. That situation does not change in a POW camp. The normal civilian world exists only as the subject of melancholic longing. Or as one soldier put it: “Life is cruel. When I think of my wife—!”314
“I was in an SS quarters… [In a] room, there was an SS man lying on the bed, without his tunic but with his pants still on. Next to him, on the edge of the bed, was a very pretty young woman, and I saw her stroke the SS man’s chin. I heard her say: “You’re not going to shoot me, are you Franz?” The girl was still very young and spoke German without an accent… I asked the SS man whether this girl… was really going to be taken out and shot. He answered that all Jews were going to be shot. There were no exceptions… He also said something to the effect that it was a bitter reality. Sometimes they had the chance to hand over these girls to another execution commando, but mostly there wasn’t the time. They had to do it themselves.”315
