The Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger — Read

In mid April 1916 I was detailed to attend an officers' training course at Croisilles, a little town behind the divisional front. The course was under the personal charge of the general of the division, Major-General Sontag. Theoretical and practical instruction was given in a whole series of military matters. The lessons in tactics on horseback with Major Jarotzky were particularly attractive. We made a number of expeditions to see the great organization that had been conjured up practically out of nothing in the back areas; and it gave us an idea, accustomed as we were to look down on all that went on behind the fighting line, of the immense amount of work that went on in rear of the fighting troops. We saw the slaughterhouses, the commissariat depot, and the equipment for the repair of guns at Boyelles, the sawmills and pioneer park in Bourlon wood, the dairy and the pig farm and plant for turning carcases to account at Inchy, the aviation park and the bakery at Quéant. On Sundays we motored to the neighbouring towns of Cambrai, Douai, and Valenciennes, "in order to see women for once."

I had not been at all pleased to leave the front line and my platoon, to which I had grown more and more attached; but still I used the time to rid myself completely of war and its clamour. I had books sent me, and I read and wrote and rode and went long walks and made a collection of beetles, and in order to fight my rooted tendency to solitude I was glad to spend my evenings in the mess, where there soon grew up that cheerful, careless spirit that is characteristic of a body of Prussian officers.