Into the Maelstrom
A review of Ernst Jünger’s “Storm of Steel”
It’s an exaggeration – though not much of one – to say that Storm of Steel author Ernst Jünger enjoyed war. As the Vietnam veteran and novelist Karl Marlantes put it in his 2016 foreword to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the World War I memoir, Jünger was simply a “different breed of man: the born warrior.” Men like Jünger, Marlantes argues, possess a singular preoccupation with war, with fighting, with combat, that’s not found in ordinary soldiers. They see war “not as something to endure but as something meaningful to them, something they want to engage in more than anything else.”
Nonetheless, Storm of Steel derives much of its power from the dispassionate, matter-of-fact tone Jünger takes toward his material. As a result, he’s able to describe the routine brutality of industrial war in unflinching and visceral terms – all without passing much in the way of judgment on either war itself or the particular war he found himself fighting. While a certain romanticism toward combat and national chauvinism seeps into his writing from time to time, these occasional sentiments rarely overwhelm Jünger’s otherwise straightforward and immediate account of World War I combat and do little to detract from it.
Even so, it’s not hard to find passages that reflect a latent romanticism toward war or a reflexive nationalism. As he concludes his account of Germany’s failed spring 1918 offensive, for instance, Jünger waxes lyrical: “The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience.” His account of his final action before the armistice takes a similar tack, lamenting that the assault “was our last storm” and looking back wistfully on the times he and his unit “had advanced into the setting sun in a similar frame of mind!”
Still, Jünger expresses far more ambivalence toward the war in these selections than might be expected from a dyed-in-the-wool militarist – or even just a veteran nostalgic for the camaraderie of the trenches. He clearly views his wartime experiences as worthwhile and meaningful in and of themselves, and he returns to the front time and again despite receiving wounds in battle after battle over the course of the war. At the same time, however, he recognizes that the war cannot grind on forever and accepts that it must eventually come to an end. The weary mood of the book’s final chapters strongly implies that Jünger sees the war’s end as inevitable, the inexorable culmination of largely impersonal events and forces set into motion back in August 1914.
Even in Jünger’s tightly focused account, it’s not hard to see the wheels coming off the German war machine. During the war’s last major German offensive, for instance, he and his unit overrun British positions and marvel at the creature comforts available to their opponents. British dugouts were “the height of luxury,” including kitchens fully stocked with eggs, jam, “and everything to delight an epicure’s heart.” The contrast with the meager resources provided to German troops could not have been starker in Jünger’s eyes; he says he often returned to that glimpse into the “enviable circumstances of our foes” as he subsisted on the thin gruel available in German trenches.
Jünger’s narrative also makes clear that disease – and in particular the concurrent influenza pandemic, the so-called “Spanish flu” – took a toll on the combatants in the war’s final year. He relates that before the last big German push he had come down with what he merely calls a cold, blaming it on a lifelong tendency toward “throat inflammation.” In any case, he says, his battlefield exertions “helped me sweat off this latest bout.” Later, he recounts that an entire battalion sent to relieve his unit “was almost wiped out” by influenza while “several men a day” fell ill with the flu in his own company. Though the pandemic affected the Allies as well, German troops “were more prone to it” due to their “poor rations.”
More than anything else, however, it’s Jünger’s unsparing and largely unsentimental depiction of industrial age warfare that makes Storm of Steel compelling. As much as war obviously enthralls Jünger, he makes the miserable and frequently terrifying nature of life in the trenches and on the front lines of World War I perfectly clear. That’s especially evident in his firsthand accounts of the regular artillery barrages soldiers on both sides of the Western Front faced. The first experience of shelling almost immediately induced a sense of claustrophobia and omnipresent terror among fresh soldiers that coexisted alongside the gory monotony of the trenches. It was a feeling, Jünger writes,
that was to accompany us all through the war, that habit of jumping at any sudden and unexpected noise. Whether it was a train clattering past, a book falling to the floor or a shout in the night – on each occasion the heart would stop with a sense of mortal dread. It bore out the fact that for four years we lived in the shadow of death.
Recounting a British artillery barrage ahead of the Somme offensive in 1916, Jünger notes that it’s “an easier matter to describe these sounds [of artillery bombardment] than to endure them.” Later episodes of shelling “acquired a demented fury” that made it impossible “to think logically” or communicate; as Jünger tells it, it was “as if we were facing an elemental force.” The end result of these bombardments proved horrific: “the churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized they were stacked in layers.”
Equally harrowing are Jünger’s accounts of both trench warfare and mobile operations toward the end of the war, due in no small part to the impersonal nature of his prose. Soldiers in the trenches take seemingly random incoming fire from rifles, mortars, and guns, with one man wounded when “shot through both cheekbones” and another killed when “a bullet shattered the back of his skull.” Mobile warfare proved more intense and chaotic; as Jünger describes the initial action during the last major German offensive of 1918, “there was firing from craters on all sides, not to mention the bullets fizzing down from the embankment on friend and foe alike.”
As perceptive an observer and expressive a writer as Jünger can be, however, he’s not given to introspection or reflection. It’s not as though he didn’t discuss deeper issues with his fellow soldiers, however. During their downtime behind the front, he and his fellow soldiers “often sat up over a cup of tea, played cards and chatted. The perennial question came up a lot, of course: Why does mankind have wars?” Jünger doesn’t relate the substance of these discussions, much less his own views on the subject. He simply reports that soldiers at the front raised these questions and talked about these issues, nothing more.
Jünger likewise makes a number of succinct but incisive comments throughout Storm of Steel, but he rarely explores them in any detail or depth. Early on, for instance, he tells readers that thanks to his first taste of combat he now has “good and serious thoughts” about the war but never really expands on them. Near the war’s end, for instance, he “felt that the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up, and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.” Gravely wounded and feeling his life ebbing, he later professes to have “understood, as in a flash of lightning, the true inner purpose and form of my life.” But Jünger steadfastly refuses to elaborate on these gnomic statements, quickly moving on to more evocative descriptive accounts of the fighting.
Death constantly haunts his narrative, so much so that at times Jünger refers to it by name and title. It’s a force of nature that dances around the battlefield, one that looms up and slinks away, reaps “great swathes” as it nips at soldiers’ heels and finally puts its hand on them. But Storm of Steel contains few if any serious or sustained meditations on mortality that multiple brushes with death might otherwise provoke. Jünger professes nonchalance in the face of his own demise, saying that “the prospect of death neither hurt not frightened me.” Perhaps, but he does not give an impression of a person who has given the subject much thought.
That’s probably for the best, since Storm of Steel itself supplies precious little evidence that Jünger’s musings on war or life and death would be terribly profound or even interesting. Glimmers of humanity sprinkled thought his prose and elegant crafted observations notwithstanding, delving deeper into these larger issues than Jünger does would only distract from the grim and brutal realities found in his account of World War I. As entranced with war as he clearly was, Jünger neither glorifies nor condemns war in Storm of Steel – in the main, he aims to present the ordeal of combat as plainly as he himself experienced it.
In the end, it’s this stark, impersonal portrait of war on an industrial scale that makes Storm of Steel well worth reading.