The Storm of Steel

The Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger's memoir opens with introductory remarks by R. H. Mottram framing the author as a sincere, unflinching young German volunteer whose honesty, rather than ideology, gives the account its value, and then shifts to the author's own foreword recalling the opposing British trenches near Monchy-au-Bois and the strange, almost peaceful intimacy of early trench warfare before the Somme. The narrative proper begins with Jünger, a nineteen-year-old volunteer, arriving with the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers in Champagne in December 1914. His first encounter with war's reality comes almost immediately: a shell strikes the château at Orainville, killing and wounding soldiers in the village before he has even reached the front. He endures the exhausting, waterlogged trench routine near Le Gauda, learning the grinding discipline of guard duty, flooding dugouts, and the casual cruelty of veteran soldiers toward volunteers. After training interludes at Recouvrence and in a Belgian town, his unit moves to Les Éparges, where he experiences his first real battle: heavy bombardment, mutilated corpses of French soldiers left unburied for months, and his own light wound from a shell splinter, followed by hospitalization in Heidelberg. Returning as a cadet and then lieutenant, Jünger rejoins the regiment at Monchy-au-Bois, a shattered village held through an elaborate network of trenches, redoubts (the Torgau and Altenburg Redoubts), and a defensive quarry. Here he settles into an extended period of static trench warfare, detailed in diary-like entries: constant shelling by a flanking battery, deaths and woundings among his men, gas attacks, rat hunts, a bizarre exchange of taunts and sportsmanlike parley with a British officer, and the construction of elaborate dugouts and tunnel systems. He also describes rest periods at Douchy and Bazancourt, officer training courses, a brief romantic episode with a French girl named Jeanne, and the peculiar institutions of rear-area life, including the mock-monarchies run by town-majors. In 1916 Jünger is drawn into the Battle of the Somme, first near Guillemont and Combles, where he witnesses apocalyptic bombardment, the annihilation of entire companies, corpses layered in the churned earth, and his own wounding by a shrapnel bullet in Combles — an injury that saves him from the subsequent destruction of his company, nearly all of whom are killed or captured. He reflects at length on how this battle transformed the nature of war into a contest of pure material and machinery, ending the age of chivalry. After recovery, he serves as a scouting and observation officer near St. Pierre Vaast wood, is wounded again, and later participates in the German withdrawal to the Siegfried Line, including the deliberate devastation of villages before the retreat. Further episodes follow at Fresnoy-le-Grand, Riqueval farm, and along the St. Quentin Canal, including repeated narrow escapes from direct hits on his quarters and dugouts, and a vivid night engagement at an outpost near Ascension Farm in which his patrol fights off an attack by Indian troops (Rajputs) serving with the British, several of whom are taken wounded or prisoner.

By Ernst Jünger · First published 1920 · Genre: War memoir, Autobiography, Military history · 19 chapters · 98,842 words

First lines

The train stopped at Bazancourt, a small town in Champagne, and there we got out. With unbelievable awe we listened to the slow pulsation of the machinery of the front, a tune to which long years were to accustom us. Far away the white ball of a shrapnel shell melted into the grey December sky. The breath of the war passed by us with its peculiar horror. Did we imagine that nearly every one of us would be swallowed up in the days when that dull muttering over there broke out into unceasing thunder... one earlier, another later?

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World War I · Western Front · trench warfare · memoir · war diary · first-person narrative · German soldier · coming of age · Battle of the Somme · infantry · artillery · death and violence

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