The Eastern Front was the war's great killing ground — a theater of such distance and scale that the Western campaigns look almost small beside it. Roughly three of every four German soldiers who died in the war died fighting the Soviet Union. There was often no continuous front line, only a fluid mass of advances and retreats across frozen steppe and forest, with partisans behind and a numerous, resilient enemy ahead. A rifleman moving forward in that country did so expecting fire from any direction, and "advancing with caution" was less a pose than the only way to stay alive.

The rifleman leans into a wary step, rifle held ready across his body, the grey Kharkov parka bundled against the cold — a man reading the ground before he commits to it. He completes the Kharkov-parka group with the Grenadier with MG 42 and the Grenadier Getting Up to Move, and falls in naturally beside the Grenadier Advancing with K98. A winter Eastern-Front diorama, white ground and grey figures, is where the whole group belongs.

W. Britain model 25071. 1/30 scale, matte-painted metal. Single figure — a Waffen-SS rifleman in a Kharkov winter parka, advancing with caution. Boxed.