The Battle near Kutno is Hans Reiter’s first actual combat, and its significance lies less in a military outcome than in the bewildering way he passes through danger. German casualties establish the assault’s cost; Reiter’s survival, and the sergeant’s inability to explain it, make him appear at once unchanged and inexplicable to those who fought beside him.

Background and Deployment

Reiter’s 79th Division fought Polish forces on the outskirts of Kutno. The Poles were few and poorly armed, but initially appeared unwilling to surrender; the clash was brief, and it ultimately became clear that they did want to surrender but did not know how. Reiter’s assault group was sent against a farm and a forest where the remaining Polish artillery had concentrated.

Before the group left, Captain Gercke expected Reiter to be killed. His extraordinary height seemed to make him an obvious target, and Gercke imagined him exposed among a pack of predators. That expectation frames the episode’s reversal: Reiter goes into the attack, but the danger anticipated for him falls instead on other members of the group.

The Assault and Its Cost

The fighting took place in two attacks. At the farm, two German soldiers were killed and five wounded. In the attack on the forest, another German soldier was killed and three more wounded. Reiter emerged from both assaults unharmed. His survival is not presented as the result of a documented tactical maneuver; the account leaves the reason open, making the disparity between his apparent vulnerability and his outcome central to the scene.

That night, the sergeant who had commanded the group reported to Gercke that Reiter had somehow frightened the opposing soldiers. Gercke tested possible explanations—whether Reiter shouted, cursed, acted ruthlessly, or became a fearless warrior or hunter in combat. The sergeant rejected those possibilities. Reiter had remained the person everyone knew: he followed orders, neither disobeying nor failing to obey, and was not in a trance. Yet the enemy repeatedly fired at him without hitting him, becoming increasingly dismayed.

Reiter’s Unexplained Composure

The sergeant’s account gives the battle its distinctive psychological force. Reiter did not seem to undergo a recognizable change into a different, merciless self. Instead, he entered combat as if he were not entering combat—as if he were absent, or the quarrel had nothing to do with him. The narration carefully distinguishes this state from paralysis or a trance, without replacing the uncertainty with a definite explanation.

The episode therefore makes Reiter’s survival a puzzle rather than a triumph. The others can describe what happened and what they saw, but their interpretations remain provisional. His apparent distance from the fighting does not mean that he disregards orders or escapes the battle’s consequences for his unit; it marks the gap between observable conduct and an explanation of that conduct.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The 79th Division continued fighting near Kutno, but Reiter took no part in another skirmish there. Before the end of September, the division was moved by train to the western border to join the rest of the 10th Infantry Corps. From October 1939 until June 1940, the unit remained in place near the Maginot Line, with the soldiers listening to the radio, eating, drinking beer, writing letters, and sleeping. The movement from the concentrated danger of Kutno to a long, uneventful wait gives the battle a contained place in Reiter’s military experience.

The event also establishes a recurrent tension in his portrayal: other people seek a legible account of him, but the evidence they possess resists a simple answer. Gercke’s expectation that Reiter would die and the sergeant’s report that the enemy could not hit him form opposing interpretations of the same tall, exposed figure. The battle offers no supernatural confirmation and no final account of why he survived; it leaves the reader with a witnessed event whose meaning remains unsettled.