The Constant Soldier - William Ryan

 

There is a lot of World War II fiction out there to choose from, but William Ryan's The Constant Soldier takes one of the more unusual approaches to the subject I've come across in a while. The narrator of Ryan's story is a young man who is only in the German army at all because he and a young woman had been arrested in occupied Poland as suspected agitators. Given the choice of army or prison, Paul Brandt chose the military option.

Now he is back home, a terribly maimed soldier who is pitied by most of his neighbors, but resented by many others because of his service to the Germans. Brandt is not proud of what he did on the Eastern Front, and he is battling demons of his own making. Then on one of the long walks Brandt uses to calm himself, he spots what he will later learn is a "rest hut" for the SS officers running the Auschwitz concentration camp twenty miles away. Appallingly, he also recognizes one of the female prisoners being forced to work in the rest hut, the very woman for whose arrest he still feels a terrible responsibility.

Now he has to find a way to keep her alive.

What William Ryan offers here is more than the usual war thriller. The Constant Soldier provides insight into the mindset of the SS officers and the civilian population surrounding the camp. As the novel evolves, some of the officers will recognize the evilness of what they have done but others will still take pleasure from what they do every day. Polish civilians, already under suspicion for simply being Polish, will manage to form a resistance of sorts, but most will have to resign themselves to simply trying to keep their own families alive. 

All the elements of a thriller are here, but it is Ryan's exploration of the minds of characters on both sides of the fight that make The Constant Soldier such a standout in the World War II historical fiction genre.