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 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Guillemont”
In August of 1916, Jünger’s regiment is shipped to the heart of the Battle of the Somme, a small village named Guillemont. They stop first at Combles, which has been destroyed by artillery; only a few buildings are left standing: “So far as we were able to see in the dark, Combles was a mere skeleton of its former self. Great amounts of wood and jettisoned household objects told us that its destruction was very recent” (93).
The entire area is under heavy artillery fire: “From time to time, the gigantic impact of a fifteen-inch shell drowned out all other noise. Clouds of shards washed through Combles, splattering against the branches of the trees, or striking the few intact roofs, sending the slates slithering down”(94). Jünger’s regiment is sent to the front, where they take positions in the shallow craters of bombs. The smell of the dead is everywhere, and Jünger finds corpses hurried beneath their positions by artillery: “The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons, and dead bodies” (97).
One of Jünger’s men is buried by the earth of an explosion. Others simply disappear, as does the village of Guillemont, only a chalk stain to mark where a limestone house had been. Still others sustain injuries, and Jünger sees his position slowly being overrun by superior numbers and firepower.
After being relieved from the front, Jünger is wounded in the village when an artillery shell sends a stray shrapnel into his leg. Later, he finds out that his entire regiment, save one man, is killed on the battlefield when the position they are defending is overrun. The British take the villages of Guillemont and Combles, which they hold, Jünger says, until the Germans take them back two years later.
Chapter 7 Analysis
Guillemont shows how truly devastating war can be. Jünger has related the back and forth attacks in the trenches—the grenades, the mortars, and the snipers taking pot-shots at one another. However, he realizes what he saw before was small in comparison once he gets to the front at Guillemont, where the artillery is constant: “Ahead of us rumbled and thundered artillery fire of a volume we had never dreamed of; a thousand quivering lightnings bathed the western horizon in a sea of flame” (91).
This artillery fire strips the soldiers of feeling. When a runner comes to take them forward, Jünger says of the man: “The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us [...] Nothing was left in his voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it” (92).
Jünger’s second impression of the battlefield, after the artillery fire, is death: “Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses” (93). The smell follows them everywhere, as do the corpses, which creates a feeling of dread in them: “Here, and only really here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country” (93). Jünger is saying that he has never experienced anything like it—it is so foreign to him as to seem another country entirely, ironic since he is in another country at the time. Even the noise seems foreign to Jünger:
Because of the racking pains in our heads and ears, communication was possible only by odd, shouted words. The ability to think logically and the feeling of gravity, both seemed to have been removed. We had the sensation of the ineluctable and the unconditionally necessary, as if we were facing an elemental force (95).
This type of warfare, Jünger is saying, robs a man of the will to live. When he is wounded, he does not care. When his position is in danger of being overrun, all he can do is hold on. Even back in the village, as the bombs continue to fall, the men go about as if robbed of all will: “While we were eating, a shell landed on the house, and three others came down near by, without us lifting our heads. We had seen and been through too much already to care” (103).
