The story addresses the experience of German soldiers during the Second World War on the Eastern Front, where fighting was particularly vicious and unforgiving.

He also meets Olina, a Polish prostitute, who has been working for guerrillas but who has become disillusioned with such activity, seeing it as begetting yet further cycles of violence and aggression rather than leading to a proper way out of the bellicosity of the situation.

[4] During their trip we learn much about horrors soldiers endure in the war, and the effect it leaves on a person.

Andreas has a particularly passive (some might say stoic) attitude to his involvement in the conflict, and the inevitability of death (and the question of fate) hangs over the narrative in a tragic fashion.

It is arguable that the only real choices in the novel, presented in its opening gambits, involve the place and manner of Andreas's death in the war, rather than the possibility of its evasion.