The Losers

Nazi propaganda has taught the world to think of Hitler's armies as inhumanly efficient masses. Last week in mourning Germany, Berlin's propagandists changed key, began trying to humanize the common soldier of the Wehrmacht. In doing so, they allowed one Bert Naegele to speak for the young men in the winter snows:

"It's a long time when you're young, full of plans and burning to 'mold life' with your own hands. Years are flying past us; we are getting older. There's a big hole in our lives.

"War is a reality we have come to know intimately in three long years. It made us hard in distress, danger and enemy fire. But not hard enough. It can't keep that boiling hot fear from surging over us that the past is gone and irrevocable, that when we finally lay down our guns youth shall be gone, wasted in the flames of battlefields, blown away by the breath of death, trod down by the implacable march of time.

"We measure in our minds the span which will remain to us after the end of the war and always find it too small to pack into it all we preciously saved of unsatisfied longings, unfulfilled desires, carefully imagined plans and deeds not yet done.

"When we talk about these things with one another we try to laugh them off and tell how we will live all the more intensely afterwards. But the casualness is not genuine. Secretly inside we doubt. Fear is bored deep in our hearts that we are losing the race with life."

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