Modern European History
The Storm of Steel Response
Ernst Junger, was a German who served in WWI. While in the trenches, posted in NorthEastern France, Junger received an estimated 20 wounds, and still remained an enthusiastic soldier, to record his experiences in The Storm of Steel. Junger’s writing is captivating as it creates a vivid image of the injuries suffered along with the soldiers that received them. For example, he writes, “ Diener, climbed on to a ledge in the side of the trench to shovel earth over the top. He was scarce up when a shot fired from the sap got him in the skull and laid him dead on the floor of the trench. He was married and had four children.”
The previous passage is a good example of the way in which Junger vividly portrays the unsuspected deaths of his fellow soldiers. He carefully, and rather bluntly, describes the locations of the wounds that brought death upon his men. He then goes on to write, “His comrades lay in wait a long while behind the parapet to take vengeance. They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little they grasp the war as an objective.” This is the point when the reader begins to understand the personality behind the writer, and the implications the war experience has had on him, and also the way in which he deals with the atrocities he witnesses.
Junger sees the battlefield as, “if death itself had taken on the appearance of a fair.” It’s as if war has merely become a mass of impersonal men participating in a game or sport of strategical warfare; as he goes on to write about his encounters with the enemies commanders after ‘unfair’ shots killed some of his men. He writes, “It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to this courage..It depends, of course, on not letting oneself be blinded by an excessive national feeling…” He is a German, but believes that he has ‘found many kindred souls among the British officers.’ War, in his experience, was not motivated by his national pride or his personal losses.
You might think that Junger is a man who has made himself into a loyal, strategic soldier, without prejudice. However, he holds no value to human life as he views the carnage created during war time, as the excrement of larger, more important point – the sport of being a warrior. He finds comfort among fellow expert athletes, although they may be the ‘enemy.’ This is the picture that Junger seems to paint for himself, however, there is a slight wavering in his tale. “We spent Christmas Eve in line. The men stood in the mud and sang Christmas carols that were drowned by the enemy machine guns. On Christmas Day we lost a man in No. 3 platoon by a flanking shot through the head. Immediatlely after, the English attempted a friendly overture and put up a Christmas tree on their parapet. But our fellows were so embittered that they fired and knocked it over. And this in turn was answered with rifle grenades. In this miserable fashion we celebrated Christmas Day.”
Junger could think that the men had spoiled the ‘friendly overture’ with their embittered fury, or he could be hinting that the war itself had taken on a rather miserable monotony. Junger’s writing is a candid portrayal of the loss not only of lives, but of the minds of the men who live. I couldn’t imagine a warrior such as Junger returning to an industrial livelihood. Perhaps that is why he choose to write The Storm of Steel.