Storm of Steel

“War had shown its claws, and stripped off its mask of cosiness. It was all so strange, so impersonal. We had barely begun to think about the enemy, that mysterious, treacherous being somewhere. This event, so far beyond anything we had experienced, made such a powerful impression on us that it was difficult to understand what had happened. It was like a ghostly manifestation in broad daylight.”.

Jünger and his fellow soldiers have just arrived at the front when an artillery shell strikes a chateau near where they are quartered and kills 13 people. Until this point, Jünger and the others have been eager to experience war, even though they don’t understand what it is. This one incident, before they even arrive at their battle stations, does not open their eyes as to what war is, but rather confuses them further. Since Jünger says that the incident also causes auditory hallucinations for him all through the war, readers know it has a lasting effect, and that his confusion about war lasts as well.

“The landscape, in which yellow marsh marigolds seemed to have sprouted overnight, was set off by the sight of numbers of half-naked soldiers along the poplar-lined river banks, all with their shirts over their knees, busily hunting for lice.”

This quote gives a good example of juxtaposition: the beauty of nature versus the ugliness of war. Jünger is in Belgium, in spring, and has a short reprieve from the war; he has dinners with the local Belgian population and takes long walks through the countryside. But the reality is always there: war is a dirty business, full of vermin, and men be spoil the beauty of nature when they wander through it at war.

“In the evenings, we sometimes took melancholy satisfaction from going on walks to Germany.”

Jünger has, to this point in his book, given no indication of family or friends back home, nor how he feels about the war besides excitement and fear. This quote, however, shows a sense of longing for home: Jünger and the other soldiers, stationed close to the German border, walk across it just to feel like they are at home. This also shows their sense of nationalism. In crossing an imaginary border, they feel like they are home again, in Germany, and not in a foreign country.

“I thought privately that this baptism of fire business was actually far less dangerous than I’d expected. In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit.”

Jünger here shows two things: the first is his inexperience in battle, and the second is that this inexperience has given him tunnel-vision. He does not realize the artillery is trying to kill him; he believes there must be some huge artillery piece or valuable target, not knowing the men that make up the army are the valuable target. He’s in shock. In the midst of a battle, he feels safe. Later, he will keep asking his trench-mate if this is a real battle, meaning that he wants to know if it will get worse, or if he’s seen as bad as it gets. He has realized his inexperience, and with the realization comes fear.

“In the rising mist, I leaped out of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Flesh like mouldering fish gleamed greenishly through splits in the shredded uniform. […] Empty eye-sockets and a few strands of hair on the bluish-black skull indicated that the man was not among the living. There was another sitting down, slumped forward towards his feet, as though he had just collapsed. All around were dozens more, rotted, dried, stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death. The French must have spent months in the proximity of their fallen comrades, without burying them.”

Jünger describes the horror of this war. The French soldiers he sees have been dead for months, and his descriptions of them are ghastly. But to Jünger, the worst part is that the French, ostensibly because of the intensity of battle, have been unable to bury their comrades just a few feet away and so must have been forced to look at them every day.

“A peculiar feeling, looking into dead, questioning eyes—a shudder that I never quite lost in the course of the war.”

Jünger is speaking of the lasting effect of the war. He has already mentioned that the auditory hallucinations from the first artillery shell will remain with him; here he says his sight will be haunted, too, as well as his memory.

“‘Why not report as a gentleman-cadet?’ my father suggested to me on one of my first mornings at home as we were walking round the orchard to see how the trees would bear; and I did as he suggested, even though it had seemed much more attractive to me at the beginning of the war to be a simple rifleman, responsible only for myself.”

While Jünger’s reasoning for becoming an officer is not clear, one thing is: he has a change of heart after being wounded. Whether he has decided that as an officer he has a better chance of surviving the war, or he has decided that as an officer he can help win the war is unclear, but his being wounded has affected him. At the last battle he bolted. Afterward, seeing his homeland, he felt it was beautiful, though it is not clear whether he thought it beautiful because he had just survived a battle, or beautiful because he thought it worth defending.

“How many a time we drew a deep breath to see the lonely light at the entrance to the village winking towards us through the black and rainy night! It meant having a roof over our heads again, and a bed in the dry. We could sleep without having to go out into the night four hours later, and without being pursued even into our dreams by the fear of a surprise attack. It made us feel reborn, on the first day of a rest spell, when we’d had a bath, and cleaned our uniforms of the grime of the trenches.”

Jünger is ostensibly speaking about the small comforts of a bed and a bath, but what he is really talking about is safety. The village is away from the front lines, away from the trenches and the artillery and the snipers that he mentions next. It is away from worry about being shot or killed by shrapnel, so he can sleep or eat or bathe in peace, without fear.

“And so there came about, as part of my diary, a conscientious account of life in C Sector, the small zigzag part of the long front where we were at home, where we knew every overgrown bit of trench and every ramshackle dugout. Round about us in the mounds of earth rested the bodies of dead comrades, every foot of ground had witnessed some sort of drama, behind every traverse lurked catastrophe, ready day and night to pluck its next chance victim.”

Jünger’s description of the trench where he lives is telling in several ways. The first is that he is a small part of a much larger army. His section is only one of many in the long front of the war. The second is that he says he felt at home, meaning that he has become inured to the war and the danger and even, in some ways, feels comfortable there. The last is that all of this occurs because of what happened there. He feels at home because it is where he stays, but he also feels at home because of the drama, the deaths, the stories of each square inch of the trench. Jünger is a story-teller, and “every foot” of land has a story in it.

“14 November. Last night I dreamt I was shot in the hand. As a result I’m more than usually careful all day.”

There are two important things to note here. The first is that Jünger dreams of being wounded, and the second is that he pays attention to these premonitions. He has been relating diary entries of the deaths of others. Those deaths and injuries—like the constant barrage of bullets and bombs—have affected him. This is similar to his reflections of other aspects of war, such as the auditory hallucinations and the questioning look of the dead that have stayed with him.

“We suffered many casualties from the overfamiliarity engendered by daily encounters with gunpowder.”

Jünger also mentions several instances where soldiers do not take the precautions they should, such as traveling in the ditch beside the road or not kneeling far enough when using the latrine. What he’s saying is that death—the bombs and bullets, the open, unseeing eyes, the corpses in front of their positions—becomes such a companion that some men no longer fear it, and so they forget to be afraid.

“On 16 June, the general sent us back to our units with a little speech, from which we were given to understand that our opponents were preparing a large-scale offensive on the Western Front, with its left flank facing our own position. This was our first inkling of what was to be the Battle of the Somme. It marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war; thereafter, it was like embarking on a different one altogether. What we had, admittedly almost unbeknown to ourselves, been through had been the attempt to win a war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of materiel of the most gigantic proportions. This war in turn was replaced towards the end of 1917 by mechanized warfare, though that was not given time fully to develop.”

Jünger here lays out the entire trajectory of World War I: the great sweep of Germany into France and France into Germany, both countries trying to win the war in quick, decisive fashion, or, as Jünger puts it, “pitched battles.” The second part of the war, the part he has been experiencing, is the stalemate, resulting in trench warfare. The next part, beginning with the Battle of the Somme, is a war for materials, each country trying to take and hold resources, and finally, in 1917, the beginning of mechanized warfare.

“These instances, in which the entire complement of men stood behind the traverses, tensed and ready, had something magical about them; they were like the last breathless second before a hugely important performance, as the music is turned off and the big lights go up.”

Jünger’s descriptions of war are not even. At times he describes armies as parasites and the war as fouling the landscape. But here the reader can sense the excitement of battle and, more importantly, Jünger’s love for it. He says the moment before the battle is like music, a grand performance. The players stand breathless, waiting. The big lights are the flares. The music the bombs and bullets. And the “hugely important performance” as the outcome of the war. The stage here then would be the war between nations, for control of history.

“During one stop on the way, a driver split his thumb in the course of crank-starting his lorry. The sight of the wound almost made me ill […] I mention this because it seems virtually unaccountable as I witnessed such terrible mutilation in the course of the following days. It’s an example of the way in which one’s response to an experience is actually largely determined by its context.”

Jünger has seen men blown apart by bombs and burned by flares and gas. He has seen bullets and shrapnel shred people. But here he is squeamish about a split thumb because he is not near the front. The wound was not taken in war. In battle, his mind becomes numb to the bombs and bullets, to all the open wounds, but a split thumb—a common occurrence, one he might have seen many times before the war began—turns his stomach, as it reminds him of time when he had not seen such horror.

“With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything through the misted visor of my gas mask. With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude. Each time I blundered into sentries or troops who had lost their way, I had the icy sensation of conversing not with people, but with demons. We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the world.”

Several times Jünger likens the army, or the war, to something unnatural: in Belgium men spoil the beauty of nature; in France artillery shells destroy fields and forests. Here, Jünger likens the men he meets to demons, which means they have entered some form of hell, all of them wandering along its edges in the darkness. War, then, is hell, and the men who carry it out are demons. Their punishment is to wander the earth in darkness.

“As far back as the Siegfried Line, every village was reduced to rubble, every tree chopped down, every road undermined, every well poisoned, every basement blown up or booby-trapped, every rail unscrewed, every telephone wire rolled up, everything burnable burned; in a word, we were turning the country that our advancing opponents would occupy into a wasteland.”

Germany is employing a strategy that Russia used against Napoleon and Sherman used in the South—a strategy the Soviet Union would use again in WWII. By destroying everything as they fall back, they give the enemy nothing to shelter in, nothing to eat, no comforts or protection, and no means of foraging for food or finding drinking water. The booby-traps are to kill as many men as they can—Jünger tells of a time-lapse bomb going off as a city gathers to celebrate victory—as are the poisoned wells and undermined roads. But Jünger does not like this type of warfare, nor, he says, do the men, as such actions are “bad for the men’s morale and honour” (128). He says it is “unhealthily bound up with the economic thinking of our age, but it does more harm than good to the destroyer, and dishonours the soldiers” (128). In other words, such destruction is to hurt the enemy economically, which will also hurt them militarily, but to Jünger, and his soldiers, there is an honor to war, even to killing and death, and booby-traps and poison are dishonorable.

“Such libations after a successfully endured engagement are among the fondest memories an old warrior may have. Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences.”

At this point, Jünger has been through several months of heavy fighting. He has just been recently been bombarded in the village of Fresnoy, where several men he knows well die, some of them ripped apart. It is rare for Jünger to show emotion in his writing; often he describes the death of men matter-of-factly, simply describing that they fell, or will, in the future, fall. But here Jünger shows that he does indeed feel emotion for the men who fell around him. He raises a drink in their honor, reminding the reader that Jünger’s memoir is that raised glass. He is offering a toast to their memories by writing about their shared experiences during the war.

“Nature seemed to be pleasantly intact, and yet the war had given it a suggestion of heroism and melancholy; its almost excessive blooming was even more radiant and narcotic than usual.”

Nature here seems heroic and melancholy to Jünger precisely because it is intact. Everywhere else he has been, the landscape has been torn to pieces by trenches and artillery. Here, the land is intact, giving it the radiant and narcotic feeling. Jünger is, of course, projecting his own feelings onto nature, which means that he feels heroic and melancholy because he is intact. He has not yet died in the war, and seeing nature blooming, profuse with life, reminds him he is alive, which, after all he has seen, seems heroic.

“Once again, I learned that no artillery bombardment is as capable of breaking resistance in the same measure as the elemental forces of wet and cold.”

By this point, Jünger has been under fire so many times he sleeps through bombardments. He has seen men killed, ripped apart in horrible ways, and he has seen entire villages flattened by artillery fire. A man can get used to fear, he is saying. He can become inured to everything he sees, even imminent death. But he can never get over the weakness that the wet and cold brings to a body. The mind can be strong, can get used to all sorts of horrors, but once the body grows cold and wet, it weakens the mind in a way bombs and bullets cannot.

“In among the fallen of this war, there were also fighters from 1870.”

Jünger never mentions any political reasons for the war: not why it started, now how it started, not any political motivations by either side. But Germany invaded France in 1870, and their victory over France has long caused animosity between the two nations. In some ways, this war Jünger is writing about is simply a continuation of those animosities, and here Jünger is reminded of the long history between the two nations, when he sees German dead buried in a small cemetery in France.

“Unfortunately, one of ours happened to be NCO Mevius […] He was lying face down in a puddle of blood. When I turned him over, I saw by the large hole in his forehead that it was too late for any help. I had just exchanged a few words with him; suddenly a question I’d asked went unanswered. A few seconds later, when I looked round the traverse to see what was keeping him, he was already dead.”

Even after so much war and so much death, Jünger is still astonished at how quickly death can come. One moment Mevius is behind him; the next minute Mevius is dead. Several times throughout the text losses such as these shock Jünger. When his friend Tebbe dies he has trouble believing Tebbe is truly gone, even though he’s seen hundreds of men die at this point. It’s a good example of how the mind often tricks soldiers into believing they will live forever, such as when Jünger says, in an earlier chapter:“The simple soul is convinced that his life is deeply embedded in nature, and that his death is no end” (143).

“‘Well, thanks be to God, all that can happen is we get shot.’”

After a near-direct hit of an artillery shell, Jünger looks down into the crater and sees a mass of men groaning in pain in red light from the battle. It terrifies him to the point of despondency. This quote, shortly after that battle, shows how low the morale of Jünger’s unit is. They’ve come to the point where they are accepting of the end; they know that the worst thing that can happen is that they die, and even that doesn’t seem so bad to them.

“A persistent smell of carrion hung over the conquered territory, sometimes unbearable, sometimes not so bad, but always nettling the senses like an embassy from another country.”

Carrion is rotting flesh, in this case the flesh of dead soldiers from both sides. To Jünger, the smell is a constant reminder of the death he has seen, the friends he has lost, and of what happens to men after they die in battle. Although he is in France, another country, the country he references here is not any sovereign state, but death itself.