Saved from the front by a sniper’s bullet, Reese returned to Germany a second time. Despite being plagued by nightmares in which, he wrote, ‘again and again I relived the horrors of the winter war, heard the shells’ howl, the cries of the wounded, saw soldiers advancing and dying, and saw myself like a stranger in my fate on the edge of no-man’s-land’, Reese volunteered to return to the eastern front for a third time in the summer of 1943. He now believed only in the spiritual journey which the war afforded him: ‘I wanted to conquer fire with fire, the war with the war,’ he wrote. Returning to
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