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 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme”
This chapter marks the intensifying activity in the trenches leading up to the Battle of the Somme. It also marks a shift in the war, as Jünger points out, saying that before the Somme there had been the hope of a quick, decisive victory through “pitched battles” (69), and after the initial battles, a stalemate of trench warfare.
Jünger has been informed that a major offensive is coming, and he is ordered to eavesdrop on the enemy trenches. Several times through the next few days, Jünger goes into the no man’s land between the trenches to spy on the enemy:
These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing (71).
The chapter also recounts the heavy artillery and the trading of firepower. The British are constantly firing at them: “After exchanging about forty mortars, the enemy gunner seemed to be finding his range. His missiles were coming down to the right and left of us, without being able to interrupt our activity until one was seen heading straight for us” (75). But the Germans constantly fire back, even as British soldiers rush their lines:
In the night we had two more bouts of firing to withstand, during which our sentries stood at their posts and indomitably kept watch. As soon as the gunning relented, numerous flares lit up the defenders charging out from their shelters, and a brisk fire persuaded the enemy that there was still life in our lines (76).
Jünger also recounts attacks of gas, namely chlorine, which burns the lungs and tarnishes metal. Several times Jünger faces death: he is caught in the open under machine gun or artillery fire; he experiences near hits in the trenches; and he is almost captured or killed while attempting to capture or kill the enemy.
In August, Jünger receives a furlough to go home but hardly arrives before he is called back. Arriving back at the front, he stays up late drinking with other officers, all of them knowing a battle is coming, the likes of which they have never seen.
Chapter 6 Analysis
Jünger’s descriptions—of the heavy artillery, the near captures and near deaths, the machine gun fire, and the gas attacks—are all told with the stoicism of a soldier: “In spite of the heavy bombardment, we lost only one man, Fusilier Diersmann, whose skull was smashed by a mortar-bomb landing on the parapet in front of him. Another man was wounded in the back” (76).
He describes the deaths and injuries as well as the constant barrage and attacks with a matter-of-factness void of emotion, but these descriptions bely his feelings. They read as journal entries rather than his true emotions in war. Only in the heaviest duress does Jünger show his true feelings: “As I went on, I looked at all the little animals lying in the pit of the trench, killed by the chlorine, and thought: ‘The barrage is bound to start up again any moment, and if you like continue taking your time, you’ll be caught in the open, like a mouse in a trap’” (80). Here Jünger likens himself to the small animals killed by chlorine gas, meaning he recognizes, one of the few times he does so, that he may die as well.
In another instance, after Jünger has been in a horrific artillery battle where shrapnel and shards are flying around him everywhere, he writes: “It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death” (80).
Other times Jünger sees a death that affects him: “On July 1, it was our sorry task to bury a proportion of our dead in our churchyard” (84). It is the word “sorry” that is telling here, as it is when Jünger writes of a later death: “A shell falling in the garden of my lodgings killed a little girl who had been digging around for rubbish in a pit” (86). Whatever the girl is looking for, the word “rubbish” tells the reader it is not worth her life.
Other descriptions also give clues to Jünger’s state of mine, especially after the battles: “In the neglected gardens, the berries were ripe, and tasted all the sweeter because of the bullets flying around us as we ate them” (89). Jünger knows another battle is coming, and so as he is on a train back to the front after his shortened furlough, he gives another brief glimpse into the longing he is leaving behind, and the fear waiting at the front: “On the way to the station, three girls in light dresses swayed past me, clutching tennis racquets—a shining last image of that sort of life, which was to stay with me for a long time” (89).
