With the German Guns: Four Years
on the Western Front, by Herbert Sulzbach
Pen & Sword Military Classics, 2004
By guest reviewer Peter R. Geyer.
Herbert Sulzbach was an interesting guy. Joining the German artillery at the beginning of World War I, Sulzbach fought through the entire war without a scratch, in the process winning two Iron Crosses. After the war, after fleeing the Nazis and emigrating to England, Sulzbach joined the British army, ultimately being commissioned as an officer during World War II. Following his second world war with his second army, Sulzbach returned to Germany, where he worked for the rest of his career as a cultural officer for the German government, eventually being awarded the Paix de l’Europe medal for the promotion of cross-cultural understanding. Sulzbach was a notable man living in notable times. However, it was with the 1935 publication of his Great War memoirs, With the German Guns: Four Years on the Western Front, that Sulzbach first gained his notoriety.
Spanning the years from 1914 through 1918, Sulzbach’s account traces his military career from the day he volunteered for service immediately following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, all the way to his long march home from the front after demobilization. In between, Sulzbach shows us an intimate portrait of a man deeply in love with, and confident in, his country. Despite the slaughter that goes on around him, Sulzbach retains an almost childlike optimism. Almost all of his friends and family in the war are killed, and yet war remains something of an adventure. Nowhere are the horrors of his situation discussed, or even mentioned. Sulzbach’s memoir is extremely intimate, ignoring the greater implications of what is going on around him, while focusing on many of the more mundane details of his daily experiences.
This intimacy is both the book’s main strength, and its main weakness. It is hard not to like Sulzbach. His writing style is fluid, and his observations are both touching and personal. But this intense intimacy also creates a bubble separating Sulzbach, and the reader, from the big picture. He gives us brief impressions without providing a context in which to frame these impressions. Combined with his remarkably intact naiveté, this lack of context leaves the reader feeling somewhat lost in space and time. The end of the war comes as a complete surprise, because as far as Sulzbach is concerned, Germany has always been the complete master of the battlefield.
I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy reading this book. It is a fine portrait of the strength of the human spirit when all around him is chaos. Perhaps that is what it was intended to be. However, it is not a book to read for the "who, what and how" of First World War history.
256 pp.
This is Sulzbach's only book.
