Human Sandbags

The Bridge (Allied Artists), adapted from the novel by Manfred Gregor, is a skillful and ferocious West German film (with English subtitles) that examines one of the more horrible absurdities of World War II: the war's end draft of German schoolboys, none of them trained, many of them thrown into Hitler's crumbling defenses as "human sandbags."

Seven German schoolboys, all 16, all in the same small-town classroom, are called to the colors on the same day: April 27, 1945. The first half of the film expounds the character and background of the boys with a warmth and sensitivity that soon makes the moviegoer care very much what happens to them. Juergen, son of a rich landowner, is passionately proud of a father fallen for the Fatherland and boyishly eager to inherit his epaulets. Walter is a bit of a bully who takes after his boodle-grabbing, dirndl-lifting father, the local Nazi Kreisleiter, but even so is devoted to his devoted mother. Karl, son of the town's beauty-parlor proprietor, is an awkward, intense Bub who discovers to his horror that the girl he worships is his father's mistress. Klaus is a charming mooncalf, innocently in love with a pretty schoolgirl.

All the boys are wildly happy to be going to war, which they regard as the continuation of hide-and-seek by other means. They are proud of their ill-fitting uniforms (most of them stripped from corpses) and fascinated with the rifles, bayonets, machine guns and bazookas they are introduced to. After one day's training, they are packed into a truck and rushed toward the rapidly approaching front in a convoy of reinforcements. But a kindly colonel yanks them off the convoy at the edge of town, orders them to guard (and expects them to abandon) a bridge with no military importance.

The boys are furious. War, real grownup war at last, not five kilometers away, and here they sit like schoolboys playing bang-you're-dead at the edge of their own home town. They dig in to defend the bridge, and suddenly the Americans are upon them. The last hour of the film is pure Schreck, a minutely observed, almost unwatchable massacre of the innocents.

Such a tale would have power, even if clumsily told; but here it is narrated with control, economy, taste. Director Bernhard Wicki simply sets the brutal facts in a clear light, lets the audience look at them, makes only one laconic comment: "The events in this story happened in 1945. Two days later the warm Europe ended."

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