Book Review
Title: Storm of Steel
Author: Ernst Junger
Publisher: Penguin Classics; 1st edition
Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 978-0142437902
Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel tells the story of the author’s experiences as a special forces soldier, then as an officer leading the special Shock Troops, in the German army during WWI (1914–1918). The book is famous for its detached point of view and for its extreme care with details. The narrative is first person, though the tone is often mechanical and objective. The story is free of any judgments about war, neither glorifying nor condemning it, but merely describing it.
Junger begins as a naïve young recruit both scared and excited about the prospect of fighting for his country. He decides early to keep a daily diary, which he miraculously maintained and never lost throughout the war. It was miraculous due to the many times he was shot, injured in explosions, and endured numerous other trials when the diary might easily have been lost. The diary became the raw material for the present book.
An example of a typical entry for one day:
“Standing at dawn on the fire-step opposite our dugout next to the sentry when a rifle bullet ripped through his forage cap without harming a hair of his head. At the same time, two pioneers were wounded on the wires. One had a ricochet through both legs, the other a ball through his ear.
In the morning, the sentry on our left flank was shot through both cheekbones. The blood spurted out of him in thick gouts. And, to cap it all, when Lieutenant von Ewald, visiting our sector to take pictures of sap N barely fifty yards away, turned to climb down from the outlook, a bullet shattered the back of his skull and he died ln the spot. Large fragments of skull were left littering the sentry platform. Also, a man was hit in the shoulder, but not badly.”
Thus ends one day’s entry from the trenches. There are other nerve-wracking descriptions of daring acts on the front lines. For example, often a handful of men would go on 3 a.m. excursions crawling towards the enemy trenches to get a closer look. These excursions often ended in someone getting killed (on either side or both sides), and a lot people barely surviving.
There were hundreds of days spent under heavy bombardment, when it was impossible to hear anyone’s orders, or to give any. During one manœuvre where Junger was leading fifty men towards an objective, after many waves of bombardments, Junger completed the objective with five men remaining. With so many such examples, it is a miracle the diary survived, as well as that the man survived to tell about it.
Some of the worst “nights of terror” involved the combinations of bombardments, hails of bullets flying all around his head, lost in the fog of a heavy chlorine gas attack. The gas masks allowed limited oxygen flow. In order to keep it on and survive the chlorine, he couldn’t move around much, because that would require breathing harder, more than the allotment of oxygen, and thus suffocate. Meanwhile, he and all the other men, were still expected to fight back, locate the enemy, and fire their weapons constantly.
The old saying “War is Hell” clearly applies to WWI as much or more so than any other, not just for the intensity of multiple types of deadly horrors overwhelming them simultaneously, but that it continued incessantly and relentlessly, happening to men who were held down in one place, barely budging forward or backwards, almost every day for four years.
Junger records many life-and-death encounters, analyzing himself as well as noting the behaviors of those around him. He makes observations about men’s character, such as “…brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards, as was shown over and over….” He often notes minute facts about people, mannerisms and personality traits, and impressions of everyone around him.
Junger notes the camaraderie in many different ways and occasions. For example, “This same man, with whom I shared pieces of metal from the same bullet, came to visit me after the war; he worked in a cigarette factory, and, ever since his wound, had been sickly and a little eccentric.” He relates several anecdotes about tender moments amid the daily fury and firestorms.
The stark descriptions persisting with such consistent detached objectivity every day for four years reflect the remarkable strength of character of the author. The book, however, is much more than diary entries. In addition to being a rare record of WWI life, the author has created a literary masterpiece. Junger proved to be a true literary artist as he spent many years after the war transforming his diary into a compelling, novelesque epic story. Regarded as a major literary figure, and having written about forty books after the present work, Storm of Steel remains the one he is most famous for.
Junger lived to age 102. He won dozens of awards and honors, from the Iron Cross in 1916 to the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca French literary award in 1981 to an honorary doctorate from Complutense University of Madrid in 1995.
While recording events with cold detachment, amid the daily fighting across trenches, he emerges as a passionate student of life, psychology, behavior, and philosophy. He proves to be a compassionate admirer of the men on both sides of the fighting, and a peacemaker who spent his life healing wounds, and being welcomed and embraced by his erstwhile enemies throughout his life after the war.