Excerpts from Ernst Jünger, Storm of
Steel (1920)
21.11. —I took an entrenching party from the Altenburg Redoubt to
C sector. One of them, Landsturmsman 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. 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 thing. They seem to
regard the Englishman who fired the fatal shot as a personal
enemy. I can understand it.
....
One morning, when, thoroughly wet through, I went up out of the
dugout into the trench, I could scarcely believe my eyes. The
field of battle that hitherto had been marked by the desolation of
death itself had taken on the appearance of a fair. The occupants
of the trenches on both sides had been driven to take to the top,
and now there was a lively traffic and exchange going on in
schnaps, cigarettes, uniform buttons, etc., in front of the wire.
The crowds of khaki-coloured figures that streamed from the
hitherto so deserted English trenches had a most bewildering
effect. Suddenly there was a shot that dropped one of our fellows
dead in the mud. . . . Whereupon both sides disappeared like moles
into their trenches.
....
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 his courage. It is exactly in
this that I have found many kindred souls among British officers.
It depends, of course, on not letting oneself be blinded by an
excessive national feeling, as the case generally is between the
French and the Germans. The consciousness of the importance of
one’s own nation ought to reside as a matter of course and
unobtrusively in everybody, just as an unconditional sense of
honour does in the gentleman. Without this it is impossible to
give others their due.
....
We spent Christmas Eve in the 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. Immediately 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.
....
At night when I lay down on my plank bed I always had the pleasant
consciousness of having in my sphere fulfilled the expectations
those at home had of me. I had given all my energies to the
defence of my two hundred metres of the front line, and cared for
the well-being of my sixty men.
It was only now when there was time for it that I was able to
experience this feeling to the full. In the winter months we had
not a thought in the trenches but of digging and "Will this damned
business never end?" It is not danger, however extreme it may be,
that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and
wretched conditions. People who have leisure can afford themselves
every luxury, even that of heroic feelings. This is true for the
people as a whole. Its moral worth can only reach its full height
when the pressure of work is not crushing upon any section of it.
....
The villages we passed through as we marched to the front line had
the appearance of lunatic asylums let loose. Whole companies were
pushing walls down or sitting on the roofs of the houses throwing
down the slates. Trees were felled, window-frames broken, and
smoke and clouds of dust rose from heap after heap of rubbish. In
short, an orgy of destruction was going on. The men were chasing
round with incredible zeal, arrayed in the abandoned wardrobes of
the population, in women’s dresses and with top hats on their
heads. With positive genius they singled out the main beams
of the houses and, tying ropes round them, tugged with all their
might, shouting out in time with their pulls, till the whole house
collapsed. Others swung hammers and smashed whatever came in their
way, from flowerpots on the window ledges to the glass-work of
conservatories.
Every village up to the Siegfried line was a rubbish-heap. Every
tree felled, every road mined, every well fouled, every
water-course dammed, every cellar blown up or made into a
death-trap with concealed bombs, all supplies or metal sent back,
ail rails ripped up, all telephone wire rolled up, everything
burnable burned. In short, the country over which the enemy were
to advance had been turned into an utter desolation.
The moral justification of this has been much discussed. However,
it seems to me that the gratified approval of arm-chair warriors
and journalists is incomprehensible. When thousands of peaceful
persons are robbed of their homes, the self-satisfaction of power
may at least keep silence.
As for the necessity, I have of course, as a Prussian officer, no
doubt whatever. War means the destruction of the enemy without
scruple and by any means. War is the harshest of all trades, and
the masters of it can only entertain humane feelings so long as
they do no harm. It makes no difference that these operations
which the situation demanded were not very pretty.
....
Even modern battle has its great moments. One hears it said very
often and very mistakenly that the infantry battle has degenerated
to an uninteresting butchery. On the contrary, to-day more than
ever it is the individual that counts. Every one knows that who
has seen them in their own realm, these princes of the trenches,
with their hard, set faces, brave to madness, tough and agile to
leap forward or back, with keen bloodthirsty nerves, whom no
despatch ever mentions. Trench warfare is the bloodiest, wildest,
and most brutal of all warfare, yet it too has had its men, men
whom the call of the hour has raised up, unknown foolhardy
fighters. Of all the nerve-racking moments of war none is so
formidable as the meeting of two storm-troop leaders between the
narrow walls of the trench. There is no retreat and no mercy then.
Blood sounds in the shrill cry that is wrung like a nightmare from
the breast.
....
After fourteen days I was lying on the feather mattress of a
hospital train. Once again a German landscape flitted by me,
tinged this time with the first dyes of autumn, and once again, as
on that time
at Heidelberg, I was gripped by the sad and proud feeling of being
more closely bound to my country because of the blood shed for her
greatness. Why should I conceal that tears smarted in my eyes when
I thought of the end of the enterprise in which I had borne my
share ? I had set out to the war gaily enough, thinking we were to
hold a festival on which all the pride of youth was lavished, and
I had thought little, once I was in the thick of it, about the
ideal that I had to stand for. Now I looked back: four years of
development in the midst of a generation predestined to death,
spent in caves, smoke-filled trenches, and shell-illumined wastes;
years enlivened only by the pleasures of a mercenary, and nights
of guard after guard in an endless perspective; in short, a
monotonous calendar full of hardships and privation, divided by
the red-letter days of battles. And almost without any thought of
mine, the idea of the Fatherland had been distilled from all these
afflictions in a clearer and brighter essence. That was the final
winnings in a game on which so often all had been staked : the
nation was no longer for me an empty thought veiled in symbols;
and how could it have been otherwise when I had seen so many die
for its sake, and been schooled myself to stake my life for its
credit every minute, day and night, without a thought? And so,
strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four years’
schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of
material warfare that life has no depth of meaning except when it
is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison
with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no
weight. And though the aim for which I fought as an individual, as
an atom in the whole body of the army, was not to be achieved,
though material force cast us, apparently, to the earth, yet we
learned once and for all to stand for a cause and if necessary to
fall as befitted men.
Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and
flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into
friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had
in store. It is not
every generation that is so favoured.
Source:
https://archive.org/stream/ErnstJngerTheStormOfSteel/Ernst_J%C3%BCnger_The_Storm_of_Steel_djvu.txt