Western Campaign

The Western Campaign is the western-front phase of Hans Reiter’s service with the 79th Infantry Division, extending from a long wait near the Maginot Line to the division’s advance into France in June 1940. It matters less as a sequence of spectacular battles than as a suspended interval: soldiers wait, listen, write, and imagine the fighting ahead, while the war’s apparent quiet is shadowed by fear and the baffling stories told within it.

Waiting at the Western Border

After fighting on the outskirts of Kutno, the 79th Division is transferred by train to Germany’s western border to join the rest of the 10th Infantry Corps. From October 1939 through June 1940, the unit remains in place. The Maginot Line lies ahead, hidden from the soldiers by forests and orchards; it is an obstacle they cannot see but around which their expectations gather.

Daily life during this wait is calm by the standards of the war. The soldiers listen to the radio, eat, drink beer, write letters, and sleep. Some speak of the future march toward the French concrete fortifications, while others respond with nervous laughter, jokes, and stories about their families. The narration gives this period duration through routine rather than combat, making the months of immobility a defining part of the campaign’s experience.

Reiter and the Meaning of Fear

The campaign follows an earlier impression of Reiter as a soldier who seems to enter combat without quite being present in it. A sergeant distinguishes this from a trance: Reiter follows orders, yet appears strangely detached from the quarrel, and enemy fire repeatedly fails to hit him. That description offers no explanation for his apparent safety; it makes his conduct an unresolved feature of how others perceive him.

During the wait in the west, Captain Gercke asks Reiter whether he is afraid of dying. Reiter answers plainly that he is. The exchange strips away any suggestion that his manner in combat proves fearlessness. His peculiar distance and his acknowledged fear coexist, leaving the campaign’s portrait of him unsettled rather than heroic in any simple sense.

Stories Within the Campaign

News that Denmark and Norway have surrendered enters the soldiers’ waiting life as a brief interruption. That night Reiter dreams of his father, the one-legged man, looking out over the Baltic and wondering where the island of Prussia has gone. The dream carries the family’s recurring geography into the western-front pause, linking the immediate military present to an older, vanishing world.

The campaign also gathers stories whose truth is less important than the unease they produce. One soldier reportedly gets lost in the Maginot Line’s tunnels, passing through a sequence of named sectors before realizing that the immaculate passageways may have had no military use and may never have held soldiers. The anecdote turns a defensive system into an empty labyrinth: an underground world whose names suggest order, but whose apparent purpose dissolves as the soldier walks through it.

Another wartime story concerns Gustav, a twenty-year-old soldier who hears military radio communications despite never serving on the communications team. A doctor diagnoses auditory schizophrenia and prescribes treatment; after initially appearing calmer, Gustav escapes the field hospital and dies by suicide. His episode sits beside the soldiers’ ordinary routines as a stark reminder that the war’s pressure is not limited to the visible front.

The Advance into France

In June, after the Somme offensive, the 79th Infantry Division crosses the Maginot Line with few surprises. It then participates in the siege of several thousand French soldiers near Nancy before being quartered in Normandy. The movement is consequential in military terms, but the narration explicitly denies it an epic character: the western-front campaign brings an advance and a siege without giving Reiter another skirmish in the material recounted here.

The interval therefore closes not with a personal battlefield triumph but with the division’s reassignment and continued movement through France. Its significance lies in this contrast between the expected drama of war and the campaign’s mixture of waiting, rumor, fear, and comparatively unceremonious advance. Reiter’s silence of purpose remains intact; the Western Campaign supplies circumstances and stories around him, not a final explanation of him.