Chilling Quote re: WW2

This quote has stuck with me since the first time I ever read it. It’s from Guy Sajer’s memoir (The Forgotten Soldier) as a German soldier in WW2. Sajer was Alsatian with ties to both France and Germany, but was given no choice but to fight with the Germans in the campaign against the Russians. Having never truly bought in to the German cause and being war weary from the get-go, the book does a good job of humanizing the many German soldiers who weren’t “in on the plan” and were otherwise led to believe they were fighting for their God or against Communism. Anyway, here’s the quote, just as the Germans and Bolshevik partisans are engaging in a series of ambushes against each other in the woods of Ukraine:

“The air was filled with woodland smells, and nothing seemed appropriate to the bloody events about to occur. The morning was splendid. Birds and small animals of every kind were running and fluttering through the branches, to get out of our way.

Wild animals, even ferocious ones, always flee armed men. This time the hunters were tracking far more dangerous game. The birds fearing and fleeing us could never have imagined that the masters of the world, who should have feared nothing, had created enemies of a size and ferocity which equaled their own. Human beings, rulers of the animal world, had created their own destruction. A process of natural selection, often very badly organized, periodically topples our crown.”

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I can’t imagine what it must have been like in WW2 for a young kid to see the semi-destruction of mankind take place before his very eyes.