This early novella successfully expands themes of the short pieces published in Children Are Civilians Too. It is the compelling narrative of one World War Two German soldier’s journey from occupied Paris to occupied Poland and it is simultaneously the bitter account of a generation whose life was destroyed or poisoned by the workings of an enormous and inescapable war-machine.

As the title suggests the young Andreas traverses the entire purgatory of Böll’s wartime railway universe; sleeping amongst heaps of grimy and exhausted fellow-soldiers on troop trains, the ghastly soup of wartime buffets, the desperate drinking to forget their fate as the cannon-fodder of an army in retreat. Throughout his long journey to the killing-fields of the Eastern Front Andreas is convinced that he is riding just to meet his death in a place ‘between Lvov and Cernauti’. But he is simultaneously seeking to recapture the one moment of feminine tenderness he has ever experienced, which, being a very young man facing death, inflates to enormous significance for him. In the succeeding days of brutality in the cruel world of ‘Hitler’s great and glorious army’ he experiences, at the climax of the novella, a night of transfiguration through a pure, lustless passion for a Polish girl, Olina. In this one highly-charged and unforgettable night everything inside is changed while the unutterably harsh world of ‘Greater Germany’ remains unchangeable outside.

There is something rawly and unsentimentally convincing in all this that makes this one of the great works to deal with the wartime period.

‘Life is beautiful, he thought, it was beautiful. Twelve hours before my death I have to find out that life is beautiful, and it’s too late. I’ve been ungrateful, I’ve denied the existence of human happiness. And life was beautiful. He turned red with humiliation, red with fear, red with remorse. I really did deny the existence of human happiness, and life was beautiful. I’ve had an unhappy life... a wasted life, as they say. I’ve suffered every instant from this ghastly uniform, and they’ve nattered my ears off, and they made me shed blood on their battlefields, real blood it was, three times I was wounded on the field of so-called honour, outside Amiens, and down at Tiraspol, and then in Nikopol — and I’ve seen nothing but dirt and blood and shit and smelled nothing but filth... and misery... heard nothing but obscenities, and for a mere tenth of a second, and twelve hours or eleven hours before my death I have to find out that life is beautiful. I drank Sauternes... on a terrace above Le Tréport by the sea, and in Cayeux, in Cayeux I also drank Sauternes, also on a summer evening, and my beloved was with me...’ p215