The Stalin Front: A Novel of World War II by Gert Ledig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fear Without End

The Stalin Front is flippantly gruesome, a script I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino never picked up. It is a catalogue of the slaughter, degradation, and physical misery that soldiers suffer. As the translator’s introduction says, it is pure Kampfschrift: ‘fighting writing’. As such there is no deviation from the one emotion that is shared by every one of its characters: unremitting fear.

There is of course fear of the enemy, which is to be expected. But there is also fear of one’s fellows - fear of superiors, in the first instance because that’s the principal instinct trained into a soldier, but also because superiors may stop acting as superiors; fear of your peers whom you know would ultimately sacrifice your life for theirs, just as you would theirs for yours; and fear of the institutions of society that have collectively agreed to put you in a position of despairing hopelessness.

Ledig summarises the source of these fears succinctly: the fear of injustice. War can be defined as the absence of justice, of even the possibility of justice. It is the knowledge that justice is unattainable from any source within war that generates both the fear and the innumerable ways in which soldiers have discovered to mitigate the effects of injustice, from the distortion of orders to desertion.

It is not simply enemy bullets which kill and maim randomly, and therefore unjustly. The entire system of war, its protocols, procedures, and military organisation are established explicitly to avoid judgments about the relative merits of a course of action, criteria of choice, or the competencies of individuals. In fact there are no individuals, only classes into which individuals are assigned - ranks, degree of fitness, and function. None of these categories attracts the concept of justice.

Ledig’s technique for describing the universality of injustice in war is to create two opposing units, one German the other Soviet, which effectively surround each other, isolating the other unit from the rest of their army. And each of these units holds captive an enemy officer at its centre. The result is a sort of corporate enclosure in which the parts also contain the whole. The world outside this enclosure effectively doesn’t exist. Those who think they’ve escaped from it meet the fate they probably would have within it.

The last thought of the German Captain as he is shot in the back trying to rejoin his men is “Is this justice?” Of course it isn’t. Neither is the non-judicial execution of the Sergeant, nor the madness of the Cavalry Officer, nor the survival of any number of cowards and incompetents. Only after the battle subsides does a vague hope reassert itself. Standing by a graveside, the NCO comments on the pious words of a chaplain about the inscrutable justice of God: “‘I secretly hope there’s some truth in it.’ ‘Yes,’ said the Major. ‘I’d hate to think that was just another trick’.”

I suppose not allowing ourselves to think it’s just another trick is what keeps us alive, in or out of war. Injustice is after all our greatest fear

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