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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BetaChapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Douchy and Monchy”
After healing from his wound, Jünger receives a brief home leave, where his father talks him into becoming an officer. He is sent to school at Döberitz, in Germany, and returns six weeks later as an ensign. In September, he travels back to his regiment in Douchy, where the “French autumn offensive was in full swing” (34). There are numerous bars, and the soldiers live in relative ease: “In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth” (36). He describes young French boys following the Germans around, wanting to join the army. An hour’s march away is the city of Monchy-au-Bois, which has nearly been destroyed by the war: “Now the houses were burned down and shot up, the neglected gardens raked by shells, and the fruit trees snapped” (38).
After describing the devastation, Jünger details the vast network of trenches cut through the countryside and the dug-out shelters the soldiers sleep in and take shelter in. He also describes the monotony and fear that pervade the entire war, as well as the loneliness: “Yes, the man even gets quite pally, talks in a soft, low voice, reveals secrets and desires. And I attend, because I too feel oppressed by the heavy black walls of the trenches; I too am yearning for warmth, for something human in this eerie desolation” (44).
He describes a day in the trenches, which begins at night: wake at 7, take watch, try to sleep, take watch, drink coffee in the morning and try to stay awake, through it all try not to think about the bombs and the bullets. Officers make more work for the soldiers. Inspections occur at odd times. The soldiers try to sleep, until dark begins to make its way down on them, and they must get up for another night.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Most of Douchy and Monchy reads as description rather than narrative, but in the description is captured Jünger’s thoughts on war. He describes looking out at the barren fields where the war has taken place: “The aspect of the landscape was dark and fantastic, the war had erased anything attractive or appealing from the scene, and etched its own brazen features, to appall the lonely onlooker” (39), meaning the war has made the land ugly. He describes the army as a “great parasitic growth” (36) when it takes over the town of Douchy.
Jünger’s thoughts can also be captured when describing the trenches, or “living quarters,” which “are about six feet high” (41). Six feet is the standard depth of a grave, meaning Jünger is foreshadowing the danger of “living” in a dug grave. In the space between the trenches, “[r]ank weeds climb up and through the barbed wire, symptomatic of a new and different type of flora taking root on the fallow fields” (41). The fields where grain should be growing are now barren and spoiled by man.
Jünger’s last description, of a day in the trenches, shows just how upended the world he finds himself in is: “Day in the trenches begins at dusk” (43). Jünger expresses how his wartime world is reversed from the normal order of things. It is night, yet the flares try to make it day: “By now, it is night-time, and the first silvery flares climb aloft, while peeled eyes scrutinize no man’s land” (43). It is a land two countries after fighting over, but it is called “no man’s land.” Jünger’s world is all backwards, he seems to be saying, thrown out of the natural order. An army is a parasite. The landscape is unattractive and barren, and night has become day. War, then, is unnatural, yet the soldier must get used to it to survive.
