The Siege of Sevastopol is presented as a brutal and unresolved ordeal in Hans Reiter’s wartime life, one that leaves him gravely wounded, unable to speak, and separated from his division. Rather than recounting the battle as a continuous military history, the narrative follows Reiter through repeated attacks and near-death, placing the confusion of combat beside his private expectation of vanishing into the sea.

The Assault and Its Reversals

Weeks after an earlier brush with death, Reiter takes part in the attack on Sevastopol. The German advance is driven back, and attempts to establish defensive lines are met by the city’s artillery. Outside the city, near the Russian trenches, mutilated German and Romanian soldiers lie in heaps. The fighting repeatedly becomes hand-to-hand: assault troops reach a trench held by Russian sailors, fight for several minutes, and retreat, only for more sailors to appear and the struggle to begin again.

The account offers no clean forward movement or decisive victory. The attackers’ advance is checked, renewed, and checked again, while death accumulates around them. Neitzke and several other members of Reiter’s company are killed in one of the attacks. Reiter’s survival does not make the battle feel mastered; each pause remains vulnerable to another assault, and the siege continues to govern the soldiers’ lives.

Reiter’s Wound and Its Consequences

During a night in the trenches, Reiter rises to his full height and looks toward the stars, but his attention turns back to Sevastopol, a dark mass in the distance. When Sergeant Lemke orders him down, Reiter removes his helmet and scratches his head; before he can put the helmet back on, a bullet strikes him, followed by another in the chest. He falls, seeing Lemke dimly as the sergeant seems to grow larger. The episode turns a brief, exposed gesture into another near-death, without suggesting that Reiter’s survival has brought him any control over the battle.

Two weeks later, in a field hospital at Novoselivske, Reiter receives the Iron Cross. A colonel cites reports of his actions at Chornomorske and Mykolaivka, shakes his hand, and leaves. The decoration and the wound are presented together: Reiter is recognized for his service, yet a bullet has pierced his throat and he cannot speak. After his chest wound heals, he is transferred to a larger hospital at Krivoy Rog, where his throat is operated on again. He can eat normally and move his neck as before, but his speech does not return.

His injuries leave his military status unresolved. The doctors cannot decide whether he should be given leave to return to Germany or sent back to his division, which is still engaged in the siege of Sevastopol and Kerch. Winter arrives, and a Soviet counterattack overruns parts of the German line; these developments postpone the decision. In the end, Reiter is neither sent home nor returned to his unit, while remaining in hospital is also no longer an option. The siege thus continues to shape his fate beyond the immediate fighting, redirecting him into convalescence and displacement rather than a clear return to civilian life or the front.

The Sea and the Limits of Recounting

The battlefield also becomes the setting for Reiter’s recurring image of disappearance. Amid the dusty trenches, the presence of Russian sailors strikes him as charged with both terror and exhilaration. He imagines that one of them will kill him, after which he will sink into the depths of the Baltic, the Atlantic, or the Black Sea: in his thought, every sea is ultimately the same, and a forest of seaweed awaits below. Death is imagined less as a conclusion than as a passage out of the visible world. The prospect that he might simply disappear gives the siege a private, inward dimension alongside its military reversals.

Wilke, speaking only to Reiter, finds the sailors’ presence inexplicable: they are miles from the sea and ships, and he speculates that perhaps the Stukas have sunk the Russian fleet or the Black Sea has dried up, though he does not believe the latter. The others, by contrast, do not question what they see or what happens to them. That contrast makes the siege’s strangeness part of its narrative texture: an impossible-seeming detail is noticed, privately tested against reason, and left unresolved rather than explained away.

Reiter’s wound finally removes him from the immediate conflict without resolving its meaning. The bullet through his throat leaves him mute even after surgery restores his ability to eat and move his neck, turning survival into an enduring loss of speech. The account does not conclude with a victory or a return to the front: winter and the Soviet counterattack interrupt the doctors’ decision, and Reiter is eventually sent to Kostekino instead of home or back to his division. The siege therefore persists in the story through its consequences—wounds, silence, and displacement—after Reiter has left the battlefield.

Aftermath and Lasting Silence

The wound removes Reiter from the fighting without bringing the siege to a decisive close. The doctors cannot determine whether he should return to Germany or rejoin his division, still engaged at Sevastopol and Kerch. Winter and a Soviet counterattack that overruns part of the German line delay their decision; eventually, Reiter is sent neither home nor back to his unit. Unable to remain in the hospital, he is transferred to Kostekino with three other wounded men. The siege’s consequence is therefore not a return to ordinary life but an unsettled passage into another place, where his wartime experience continues to shape what he encounters.

The episode also links military recognition to a lasting impairment. Reiter receives the Iron Cross for reported actions at Chornomorske and Mykolaivka, yet the bullet through his throat leaves him unable to speak even after surgery. The wound heals sufficiently for him to eat normally and move his neck, but his voice does not return. In the larger arc of the novel, the siege is one of the moments through which Reiter’s silence becomes a physical condition, while the battle’s repeated reversals and his imagined disappearance beneath the sea resist the closure of a conventional victory narrative.