50 pages • 1 hour read
Ernst JungerStorm of Steel
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1920A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Chapter 1 Summary: “In the Chalk Trenches of Champagne”
The author, Ernst Jünger, arrives in the town of Bazancourt near the front. He can hear and see artillery exploding in the distance, but like the other soldiers, he is excited:
We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Surely the war had to supply us with what we wanted; the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience (5).
Soon, however, the monotony of being a soldier gets to the men. Jünger says the long march through the Champagne region of France cools their excitement. They sleep in a barn. The next morning an artillery shell strikes the chateau they are quartered near, and 13 men die as a result. Jünger, talking to his fellow soldiers, sees that “the incident had rather blunted their enthusiasm for war” (7).
That same evening, Jünger’s regiment is moved to battle stations on the front. In the trenches, Jünger and the other soldiers experience extreme boredom and discomfort. They rarely sleep, are miserable in the rain, and are forced to dig endless trenches in the frozen chalky soil. The only slight relief they have is when the food is good, though it often isn’t, and when they are allowed a few days away from the front. One night, Jünger allows the watch officer to steal his rifle, and his punishment is being sent on a patrol that almost ends his life. Jünger and his regiment are all extremely pleased when they are sent back to Bazancourt in February.
Chapter 1 Analysis
Jünger begins his book already at the front, after training. No exact date is given, but it is December 1914, a time when the war has devolved into trench warfare. Jünger says that he and the other soldiers have “grown up in an age of security,” and they are “enraptured by war” (5). Jünger does not say they are enraptured by the war, or by this war, but by war in the general sense, meaning a sense of excitement they do not understand.
They are soon disillusioned of this excitement. The forced marches and training cool their ardor. The lack of food and physical comfort cool it even further, and the long hours of guard duty during the freezing, rainy nights, are almost unbearable.
After the artillery shell hits the chateau, Jünger begins to experience what life in wartime is really about: “That it had also had an effect on me was instanced by numerous auditory hallucinations, so that I would mistake the trundling of a passing cart, say, for the ominous whirring of the deadly shell” (7). Doctors today would call these auditory hallucinations Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as Jünger explains:“This was something that was to accompany us all through the war, that habit of jumping at any sudden and unexpected noise” (8).
Jünger’s first few days of the war then are physical and mental discomfort, as well as being relived any time they are sent away from actual duty. He claims the boredom is worse than the fear of death. However, his fear when he is sent on a night patrol, his fear at sudden noises, and his descriptions of dead French soldiers in the field make his claim unreliable.
