March Battalion
By: Sven Hassel / Narrated By: Kenneth Wright
Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
Good, but the Publisher’s Summary is misleading. And there are better out there…
It was my fault, I guess. One shouldn’t be soooo swayed by a Publisher’s Summary that one forgets oneself. Still, the Summary suggests the group of men, from a penal battalion, will be in tanks behind Russian lines, desperate to get back to German lines.
Okay, so maybe for about an hour they are, then? Not so much…
First, we don’t really know much about the men. It’s not until waaaay into the audiobook that there’s a bit of a hint that they’re from a convict battalion—baaaarely a hint. Then, we have no idea who the narrator is. I thiiiink I may have gotten a fast-swirling bit that his name is, perhaps, I dunno, “Schwinn”. Dunno, really. He just says “I” a bit and “we” a whole helluva lot, so you know someone is there, just not WHO, exactly.
Then there’s the fact that it’s adventure for a bit of the beginning with the men falling in with other Russians, learning new passwords, talking to officers, hoping their “Baltic” accents will render their speech incomprehensible in an understandable sort of way.
And that’s it. They find their way back to German lines. There’s some TERRIFIC scenes of battle and war, some stunning imagery and actions (the taking in of a terrified orphaned child into their midst, for one—truly a memorable scene). Then there’s nothing.
Pretty much nothing, at any rate. They become prison guards, deal with the brutality of those in charge. They have to watch people be executed; they have to execute one of their own. Sound compelling? It does, but not as written or even as narrated. Kenneth Wright does a capable job with the narration, but when you add his smooth tones to even-kilter writing, things get a tad dull. I dozed off during it and had to double back posthaste only to discover that I hadn’t really missed much.
I suggest City of Thieves, if you’re looking for a truth-based novel of the Russian/German battles—it’s from the Russian point of view, but both sides treated their own in pretty much the same manner—perceived cowardice, any break from form was punishable by death. Suicide missions were also the result of any breaking of rules.
And for a really, really great German POV of the experience in Russia, there’s the wildly fantastic memoir, The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer (don’t worry—I’ll soon review it, as Marchbattalion got me hankering for the real deal.)
Marchbattalion does just that: It gets your hunger going but then doesn’t deliver much. If you only have a certain amount of money, or but a credit or two, you’ll do better finding something else. Especially as it would appear it’s but the first in a loooooong, stretched out series where you’ll have to be buying something all the time to get ANYwhere in the story.
Good, but there’s just not that much there.
Audiobook only found on audiobooks.com