Poland is the first setting of Hans Reiter’s wartime advance in the novel: a territory crossed by his division in September, where a seemingly celebratory march turns into combat. The episode establishes the distance between the soldiers’ early sense of movement and the reality of violence, and leaves Reiter imagining that beneath his Wehrmacht uniform he wears the garb of a madman.

The Division Enters Poland

In September, after Reiter leaves his friends and travels with only a few items of clothing and a copy of Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region, his division advances to the border and crosses into Polish territory behind the Panzer and motorized infantry divisions. The unit moves by forced marches, initially seeing no combat and taking few precautions. Its three regiments travel almost as one in a festive atmosphere, as if on pilgrimage rather than toward a war in which some of the men will die.

The advance passes through towns without plundering them. The soldiers smile at children and young women, while motorcycle dispatch riders carry orders between the division and corps headquarters. The infantry moves ahead of its artillery; from hilltops, the soldiers look east toward an imagined front and see only the late-summer landscape, while dust from the guns behind them marks the army catching up.

From the Road to Combat

On the third day, Reiter’s regiment turns onto a different dirt road and reaches a river just before nightfall. Beyond it lies a pine and poplar forest, and beyond the forest, the soldiers are told, is a village where Poles have 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 and move through the woods. They approach the village in groups, only to find it deserted.

The next day, Reiter’s battalion encounters a Polish detachment holding a bridge. The Germans demand surrender; the Poles refuse and open fire. The battle lasts less than ten minutes. One German soldier returns with a broken nose after a Polish fighter drops from a tree and attacks him with his fists. The sudden, unexpected form of the attack leaves him unable to respond as he had imagined he would in combat. A German soldier shoots the Polish fighter as he attempts to run back into the forest. When Reiter and the rest of the battalion cross the bridge, no enemy bodies remain beside the road; the battalion’s losses are two lightly wounded soldiers.

Reiter’s Impression of the War

As the battalion continues through villages under sun and vast gray clouds, Reiter imagines that he is wearing a madman’s suit beneath his Wehrmacht uniform. The thought follows the contrast between the expedition-like mood of the first days and the bridge fight, where the violence is swift and the soldiers’ expectations prove unreliable. Poland thus marks not only the division’s entry into war but a change in Reiter’s perception of his own place within it: the uniform no longer seems to settle what kind of man is moving beneath it.

Historical and Narrative Function

Poland’s appearance in this episode is tied to the beginning of the war. Elsewhere in the novel’s layered narrative, the invasion is recalled alongside the beginning of World War II and the collapse of the ordinary world represented by Ansky’s notes. The campaign scenes ground that historical turning point in particular movements—a border crossed, villages passed, a river and bridge reached—rather than presenting war only as a distant date or political abstraction. The progression from ordered passage to a brief, disorienting fight gives the setting its narrative force.