Willy Reese - A Stranger to Myself

I ate a piece of bread and lit a candle. In its flame, I burned the pages I had covered that night; then I opened the window and scattered the ashes outside.

Dawn dimmed the stars. Day broke, and life went on. It came over me like an awakening. Dreams and images blew away. I looked to the light. Solitude was at an end. Numberless companions were on their way to me from all over the world. They were bearing torches, death’s-heads, and banners, and their singing rushed into dawn and attack. Like a column of pilgrims, they were marching into the distance, and I, nameless, went with them.

We had lost our masks, but our essence remained with us. Abroad, in life and suffering, our forms ripened, and in the immortal soul, all travails even on the brink of death were turned to light. The spirit transformed things and appearances into new life. The plowshare hurt in the fallow field of our souls. It was no longer a matter of happiness, sadness, life, death. Only fate made sense, and a man’s mission. We grew and matured as necessity made us. The mills of suffering ground at the brittle crystal, the fire of warfare purified outlook and process, and death led us within ourselves. But we kept the face of God above us like stars. We lived life, as it really was.

And so I went to my recruiting inspection, as into a ceremonial Advent.

I became a soldier.

The time of adventure began, but at first war was nothing but play. The summer sun seared the rocks and forests of the Eifel. Fields and pastures withered; the heathland crackled with dust and fire. Villages and hills flickered in the noonday heat, and dust from the troop exercise ground at Elsenborn was scattered over gardens and roads. [5] Reese is drafted to Cologne-Mülheim on February 7, 1941. He encounters the bullying of his trainers “smugly as a fat infant,” because he is still convinced that everything military will come off him like water off a duck’s back. He goes out to the exercise ground at Elsenborn in the Eifel only on June 29, 1941, after the completion of basic training. There he sees, to his astonishment, that there are aspects of a soldier’s life that he enjoys. He is overcome by “a rare feeling of happiness” that he finds bewildering. Morning mists blew over alders and birch saplings by the roadside, there was a sultry steaminess in evergreen and broad-leaved trees, and at eventide the shadows fell far across the land. Often not a leaf or stalk stirred; only the crickets fiddled a little somnolent music. Then cool and silence blew soothingly abroad into the night.

I had been a soldier for some months and now wore the warrior’s mask with assurance, irony, and patience. Never had substance and appearance been so far apart with me. Like a dream, obedience, commands, and the toughness of service hushed past me, leaving not a trace. I withstood the training like a sleepwalker. I walked in step and carried my rifle. Like a machine, I learned how to use a machine gun and a light antitank gun. An hour’s worth of reflection was enough to bring out the sadness and despair, emptiness and fear, rage and pain of my days. I did not complain about being alone. I loved it, but sometimes I was overcome by feelings of helplessness and abandon. Something inside me wanted me to remain as I had been before my draft. Even that became difficult. All thoughts of the future fled as from a huge horror, and I was barely able to overcome the shocks of the soldier’s life. But I got used to it, to never being alone, but always a stranger among strangers, separated from the others by spirit and soul, manner of life and beliefs. I went through the inevitable acclimatization, but I never allowed the noise and the monotony of the day-to-day into my private kingdom. Before long I had recovered the confidence and irony to get through it without taking damage.

I lived in the dark. Ghosts lurked everywhere. Fear, disappointment, and a continual grief marked my sorry path. It was better then to believe in the most fleeting dreams than to be helplessly at the mercy of doubt and uncertainty. I couldn’t live without the tiniest shimmer of hope. Everything on earth was growth and transformation, and as the surface changed, so the essence of a man ripened within. My dreams showed me pictures of my hidden evolution, even if I, dazzled by the days, was unable to understand them when, for a few seconds at a time, they showed themselves. I was asleep, but it was precisely at such moments that the reality and nobility of life struck me most forcibly. In this way, for all my errings, I was able to find my way back to the man I had been before the outbreak of war. Everything was a sort of homecoming to me, even if I often failed to grasp the path and the destiny, and at times I was able to shape my own life as I pleased. I was made happy by the small joys of a soldier’s life, a book, a glass of wine, some music, and a contemplative evening in the Eifel Mountains. Fate was often kinder to me than I expected and taught me to trust myself again.

Barracks life and drills seemed worse to me than war, just as the school of life took life more seriously than God and the world did themselves. Because now the metal that had been won from youth’s ore was hammered to steel, and I had to serve as anvil. The platoon was made into a fighting unit, the individual to a cog in a machine, able to fight, to overcome hardship, to suffer privation, and to attack; willing to suffer and to die, prepared to obey and to do without for the sake of the war. And so the cannon fodder was brought up to snuff. The raw material was given its form, and I took the soldier’s mask more seriously. I played my part in the great drama of assimilation, without any spectators on the stage of my destiny. The phoenix burned, and I gathered up its lost feathers. I had too much time to be able to think of myself. My existence took place within me, mostly unreflected in external events. But the change was in progress. I was becoming a soldier.

Mists like white smoke climbed out of the fields and meadows. I stood on sentry duty, feeling I was at the end of the world, in some foreign land, among foreign people. Evening came down out of a silver gate of clouds. The land subsided at my feet. Grass and shrub, near and far, slipped into shadow, haze, and scent, and silence covered the earth once more.

I set down my rifle and went looking for grasses and mosses. My boots grew wet with dew. I sniffed the fog and the chill of dusk, took off my steel helmet, and let my hair blow in the wind. It stroked my forehead, like tender hands. I was in love with every flower, every stone, and gave myself over to my looking and listening.

The past few months had sharpened my eye for the beauty of small, simple, familiar things. I saw the world more alertly. The dust and gray of the city dropped from me, and I experienced the improbable beauty and delight of the world more than I ever had in the fullness and exuberance of the summers in Darss. A flower by the roadside was a kindness to me, a forest under the scorching sun, a spider’s web pearly with dew, a butterfly, and the dance of midges at eventide, the plashing of a brook, and a lizard sunning itself on a hot stone. All these were experiences to me. The growth of wheat, bindweed, and poppy taught me to stand there with as much patience as theirs, and their innocence moved the masked man and soldier just as a repentant sinner might be moved by the comforting hand of an angel. But I was also painfully and burningly aware of the gulf that separated the dove, the shrub, and the tree from the war; and the soldier from all the love and blessings of the earth. I was no longer jaded and indifferent but found myself, like an insect with superfine antennae, shaken by the goodness and peaceableness of the earth. That was the only reason I was so grateful for the frost of early blue mornings, for daybreak and dawn chorus. It was as though, in my sorrow and cruelty, I had to be reminded of the divine. No evening seemed so mild to me as the dusk after a hot, exhausting day of misery and soldierly torment. I felt the star-bright nights, the rapture of moonlight, violent storms, and tireless pattering rain more intensely than anything I had done by the sea.