The Forgotten Soldier
By: Guy Sajer / Narrated By: Derek Perkins
Length: 21 hrs and 48 mins
My All Time FAVORITE memoir of the war viewed from the other side!!!
I gotta tell ya. Almost twenty-two hours fly by when you’re listening to something as compelling as The Forgotten Soldier, a young man’s account of his time of war. EVERYthing happens in this audiobook; Sajer sees and does it all. The first time I listened to it, I had to Google it because it seemed so unbelievable that so much should happen to one person. And while a few experts have questioned its authenticity, most have accepted it, and Guy Sajer says it’s not meant to be a definitive and chronological account of war but rather his sense of his experiences.
It starts with him as, really, just a kid, delighted to be going to war, to fight against Bolshevism, looking forward to battle. He starts with an auxiliary unit but winds up in the infantry, seeing too much, doing too much. This audiobook is a full account of a horror show that seems to have no end. It’s one brutal catastrophe after another.
But it’s also a story about true friendships, about the beauty of nature all around him, even a little about young and first love. It is simply so well-written as to be the prime basis of comparison. I couldn’t help but think of how marvelous The Forgotten Soldier was as I listened to March Battalion. I suppose I couldn’t give the latter wide-open ears, not when the former impressed me so much. Truly, as harsh as the latter was, it was nowhere near as devastating as this audiobook is. This is a brutal, brutal, story.
Of course, Derek Perkins is one of my favorite narrators, so I was pleased that he’s the performer here. He narrates everything with sensitivity, with harshness; fear and exhaustion really come through. One feels all the horror that Sajer sees. What he can’t put into words comes through loud and clear through the unbelievable performance of Perkins. There’s no way you can NOT feel for Sajer; there’s no way you can not envision all, have nightmares of all.
There. That’s it. Just a bit of a book that’ll totally devastate you…
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