The German invasion of Poland enters the narrative through Hans Reiter’s experience as a soldier in an advancing division. Its opening movement is not presented as continuous battle: the troops march behind forces that have cleared the way, pass through towns without plundering, and proceed with little sense of imminent danger. The contrast between the division’s festive mood and the war’s impending human cost gives the episode its force, while its retrospective framing links Reiter’s military past to the later public image of Benno von Archimboldi.

Reiter’s departure and the advance

Before the war begins, Reiter leaves with a new kit bag containing a few items of clothing and a copy of Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. His departure is notably quiet: he says goodbye to his landlady, but no one sees him off at the station. He has not heard from Hugo Halder or Noburo Nisamata since an earlier visit, and suspects that Halder has already gone to Berlin as if Reiter had left. The small, practical contents of the kit bag precede his entry into a conflict that will soon become a defining part of his life.

In September, Reiter’s division reaches the border and crosses into Poland behind the Panzer and motorized infantry divisions that have opened the way. The troops make forced marches but see no combat at first and take few precautions. The three regiments advance almost as one, in what the narration describes as a general atmosphere of festivity—as though the men were on pilgrimage rather than marching toward a war in which some would be killed.

An orderly march through uncertain country

The division passes through several towns without plundering them. The soldiers move in an orderly manner, smile at children and young women, and encounter dispatch riders on motorcycles carrying orders between the division and corps headquarters. They move ahead of the artillery, which trails behind in clouds of dust. From the tops of hills, the soldiers look east toward the front they imagine lies ahead, but see only a landscape in the last splendor of summer. The march’s apparent ease depends on this distance: the war is a destination imagined beyond the horizon, not yet an immediate exchange of fire.

On the third day, Reiter’s regiment turns onto a dirt road and reaches a river shortly before nightfall. Across it lies a forest of pines and poplars, beyond which, the soldiers are told, a group of Poles has taken a stand. The Germans assemble machine guns and mortars and fire flares, but receive no response. After midnight, two assault companies cross the river. They pass through the forest and approach a village in darkness; when they reach the houses, they discover that it is deserted. The regiment continues east the next day, divided across three roads parallel to the division’s main route.

The bridge and the first brief clash

Reiter’s battalion later encounters a Polish detachment holding a bridge. The Germans demand that the Poles surrender; the Poles refuse and open fire. The battle lasts scarcely ten minutes. Its brevity contrasts with the uncertainty surrounding it: one of Reiter’s comrades returns with a broken nose and describes how, after crossing the bridge with ten soldiers, he reached the edge of the forest and was attacked by a Pole who dropped from a tree branch and struck him with his fists. The German had imagined possible attacks by knife, bayonet, or gunfire, but not this. His account emphasizes surprise as much as combat and makes the encounter’s abruptness part of Reiter’s early experience of the invasion.

Historical memory and Archimboldi

The event acquires another frame through the later account of Archimboldi’s life. In discussion of his possible Nobel candidacy, he is described as a World War II deserter still on the run, a figure whose existence could remind Europe of its past. The invasion is therefore not only a military episode in Reiter’s chronology; it belongs to the history that the adult writer’s public identity seems to carry with him. The novel does not equate the wartime advance with later violence elsewhere, but it places the memory of war beside later reflections on authoritarian power, political fear, and the ways societies narrate or obscure violence.

The invasion’s presentation also depends on mediation. The march and the first clash are narrated through Reiter’s wartime experience, while the image of Archimboldi as a deserter comes from later discussion among critics. That shift between lived episode and retrospective reputation leaves the military past present but not fully resolved: the orderly march, the empty village, and the brief fight stand beside the later fact of a writer who remains publicly associated with flight from the war’s aftermath.