Anyone who thinks of war as an adventure, or thinks that a video game can portray the realities of war, should read this book. While reading, I wondered how the rest of Sajer's life turned out. He was sixteen when he joined up and nearing twenty when the war ended for him. He suffered such extreme depths of cold and malnutrition, living on the border between life and death for three years. He survived the war, but the damage to his body and mind must have been insurmountable.

Nihilism saturates every page. Like many soldiers, Sajer passed caring about the whys of war, only seeing the problem in front of his face, and sometimes not even that far. As graphic as the book is in its accounts of the physical horrors of the Russian front, it is the turning of his mind that elevates this book above other WWII memoirs.