On the devil's tail

"This is the riveting true story of Paul Martelli, a fifteen-year-old German-Italian, who fought in Pomerania, on the Eastern Front, in 1945 as a member of the 33.Waffen Grenadier-Division der SS 'Charlemagne' and, later as a solider with French forces during three years (1951-1954) in the Tonkin area, Vietnam. Paul recounts his time at the Sennheim military training base, where he was introduced to the rigorous discipline of body and mind : he then goes back to 1940, during the German invasion of France, when he was still a boy in Lorraine, hinting at his motivations for enlisting with the…