Book Review: Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel

[Contains spoilers for Storm of Steel, and The Second Apocalypse series. All quotations of the former are from the Hofmann translation.]

I.

I’ll be honest with you, friends – I’m not much one for reading memoirs or histories. I made it about five pages into Herodotus, and don’t even mention Thucydides.  But there are always exceptions, and Storm of Steel, though a memoir, comes recommended by none other than the illustrious Mencius Moldbug himself. And of course, there’s also the topic to consider: if there were ever an interesting period of history, it’s surely one of the world wars. An author must really try quite hard to make a book about war boring.

Jünger is plainly not trying for this dubious distinction. His descriptions of finding bleached skeletons, getting shelled for hours on end, attacking enemy trenches, and narrow escapes from death too numerous to count, are all related with his characteristic sense of humor. As if this weren’t enough, his ideological track is something novel for a twenty-first century reader as well. As you might expect from a Moldbug-recommended author, Jünger’s underlying values are somewhat different than what most in modern Western democracies classify as the epitome of virtue.

Now, I recognize that on first consideration a militarist attitude may not seem to some like a great positive in a book. Setting aside modern critics, even Nietzsche complains at length about this ideology, and suggests to his readers that they would be better off setting themselves in opposition to it. But recall, friends, that Nietzsche was writing in the mid-nineteenth century, when militarist ideology was mainstream in Germany. Thus, we can suppose he may have recommended opposing it more because of its status as mainstream than for the benefit or detriment of its ideas themselves. Had Nietzsche lived today, he may well have been pitching his tent closer to Moldbug’s camp.

Of course, not everyone at the time of WWI was a militarist. There were critics – German critics, even. Alas, many of these accounts are less fun to read. For example, Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front takes a much darker, heavier tone, purposed at revealing the horrors of war – an aim much more aligned with modern attitudes and values. This match in ideology perhaps is why All Quiet attained twentieth-century pop culture status, getting movies made out of it and such, while Jünger’s memoir is known only to those frequenting university history classes or neoreactionary blogs.

But the difference in tone taken by these two authors does not seem to be reflective of a difference in their direct experiences of the war. As is plain from many of the quotes below, Jünger saw just as much horror as Remarque (probably more, considering Jünger appears to have spent longer as a soldier). The differences all lie in the interpretation.

In this respect, Jünger’s book shares more in common with Erwin Rommel’s Infantry Attacks, though the latter is mostly a thesis about tactics and is light on memoir-style descriptions. Still, it’s apparent to any reader that both Jünger and Rommel’s narratives reveal a similar enthusiasm for war and patriotic sentiment, and a similar emphasis on relating facts and interesting anecdotes, rather than impressing the reader with oh-the-horror-style prose.

Rommel’s thesis is a bit dry in some places, truth be told. Luckily, Jünger’s memoir, which we are discussing here (yes, friends, I went for the lighter read to do the book review on, so sue me), while not quite what one would exactly call light-hearted, is often quite funny. Here is a small sample to whet your appetite:

Then we settled off to sleep, disturbed only by the swarming mosquitoes that bred along the stream, shelling, and occasional bombardments with gas.

Ah, a pleasant evening, how nice.

II.

We might question whether the militarist attitude of early 20^th century Germany was distinctly German. After all, weren’t the French and Americans and British full of patriotic nationalism too? (Although what do I know, I wasn’t alive then, as Alone would point out.) But these considerations do not stop us from remarking on it in Jünger’s writings. What were perhaps worn phrases and common propaganda at the time are a breath of fresh air to someone steeped in the very different attitudes dominant in the twenty-first century.

Courage is always held up as a value, then as now. But whereas moderns mostly define ‘courage’ as a willingness to post certain not-entirely-uncontroversial-but-also-not-differing-significantly-from-mainstream views on their Twitter accounts, Jünger’s definition tends more towards the willingness-to-run-into-a-hail-of-bullets variety.

In fact, unlike the more modern meritocratic obsession with competence, Jünger values people for their bravery in combat over all else, even capability, as in this case of an officer with more of the former than the latter:

In his case, too, will power had to come to the aid of his body; he was both short-sighted and hard of hearing, so that, as we were to see on the occasion of a little skirmish, he had to be pointed in the right direction by his men if he was to participate in the action in a meaningful way. Even so, brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards, as was shown over and over in the course of the few weeks we spent in this position.

No hypocrite, Jünger holds himself and his own men to the same standards:

We were up for it, in the best and most cheerful condition, and expressions like ‘avoid contact with the enemy’ were not in our vocabulary. Anyone seeing the men round this jolly table would have to tell themselves that positions entrusted to them would only be lost when the last defender had fallen. And indeed that proved to be the case.

And he’s not kidding about that last. In some engagements, out of Junger’s whole platoon, only one or two men survive. In fact, one of Jünger’s early near-misses was when his company got sent off on an attack that had no survivors whatsoever. Jünger only lived because he was he was away from the frontlines while recovering from an injury.

Would people today be willing to jump up out of their trench and follow their lieutenant in an attack in which, in all likelihood, most if not all of them would die? Did these soldiers merely obey due to their immediate circumstances and situation? Or has some cultural value fundamentally shifted in the last century?

But if so, it was hardly a uniquely German shift, as it was not a solely German value to begin with. While Jünger of course gives primarily German examples, by other accounts American, English, and French soldiers shared the same military values at the time. As a good, patriotic American, I’m hardly going to dispute that.

But what kind of distinctly German cultural attitudes does Jünger display?

Here’s at least one notable emphasis of Jünger’s that fits the German stereotype: drinking. Hardly a chapter goes by but that Jünger tells about his company or platoon coming upon some hidden stash of alcohol. After finding such a windfall, of course, and he and his fellow soldiers then have to stay up late into the night enjoying their discovery. Often, this is at the expense of their combat-readiness the next day (or at three in the morning when the English start shelling them).

But their drinking by no means implies they are lazy, as the descriptions of the elaborate trench setups they build attest:

Through constant work, one thirty-step shelter after another was dug out of the chalk and clay soil, and linked by cross-passages, so that we could go from right to left of our frontage in safety and comfort, entirely underground. My own favourite project was a sixty-yard underground passage linking my dugout with the company commander’s, with other dormitories and munitions depots off to either side, just like a regulation corridor.

Jünger’s enthusiasm sometimes even goes beyond the mere following of orders – even to the extent of planning and executing his own apparently unauthorized excursions to attack enemy trenches. Though the excursioners’ bravery cannot be questioned, the tactical utility of these is something our dear author is probably too biased to present an objective assessment of.

Jünger’s tales of this type generally begin the same way: He is sitting around in the trenches one day, getting bored. So, he goes and gathers up some fellows with similar sentiments towards seeing some action. Then, they wait until night, and creep out between the lines into no-man’s land. Sometimes they cut enemy wires. Sometimes they attack enemy trenches or watch posts. Sometimes they just creep about at random until they get lost and start getting shot at. Mostly they call it a night and run back after someone starts shooting at them (usually the enemy – only occasionally do they get that lost).

To be honest, friends, when I read this, this hobby seemed a bit dangerousto me. I started to wonder – is this just a Jünger thing? Is he crazy? And my supposition wasn’t wholly without basis, especially when you consider that Jünger appears to make many decisions based on neither orders from above nor logical reasoning. Rather, he takes action because he is bored, or angry at the English because they manage to kill someone he knows with a lucky shot, or because the English start their shelling while he is in the middle of eating breakfast, or something else with equal tactical weight. However, he attributes to these events an unlikely degree of specific and directed malice, where one would normally suppose only general intent on the part of the enemy. That is, of course the enemy was trying to kill Jünger’s platoon in general by shooting at and shelling them. But they didn’t choose to shoot that exact guy just then, rather they just got in a lucky shot. And they didn’t choose to start shelling specifically to interrupt Jünger’s breakfast, rather that was just when they were ordered to start. Yet, Jünger often makes decisions and takes actions out of a personal desire for ‘revenge’ or ‘getting back’ for these ‘slights’.

Not only are some of Jünger’s actions not called for by orders or tactical necessity – sometimes, his outings are in outright defiance of orders. In one case, when some soldiers going out on an attack pass Jünger, Jünger makes the personal decision to accompany them: “Even though I wasn’t supposed to leave the outpost, I decided to join them for the hell of it.”

But it quickly becomes clear that this attitude is not unique to Jünger. Everyone around him is making decisions the same way, and regards (or disregards) the risks in the same manner.

Jünger isn’t even the craziest one out there. On one occasion, some others from the reserve line, who Jünger implies were a bit drunk (as if just saying they were in reserve weren’t enough to do so already, see above), walk up to the frontlines where they weren’t even posted and – well, I’ll let Jünger tell the rest:

They had obviously been celebrating, and had had the bizarre idea of leaving our cosy reserve camp behind, walking through the pitch-black wood to the front line, and, as they said, go on patrol. It’s always been a principle of mine that a man should be responsible for himself, and so I let them climb out of the trench, even though our opponents were still agitated about something. Their patrol, admittedly, consisted of nothing beyond looking for the silk parachutes of French rockets, and swinging these about their heads, chasing one another back and forth under the enemy’s noses. Of course, they were fired at, but after a long time they returned happily enough. Bacchus looks after his own.

Jünger is generally more sober when he makes his own forays. But I was left wondering – does Jünger do this because he believes it will do genuine damage to the enemy and make a difference in the war? Is it to prove himself to his subordinates and other officers, and gain a reputation for bravery? Is he trying to gain achievements, and rack up merit for a promotion? Or is he really just bored, like he says?

It is enlightening to consider his description of another occasion where he undertakes an unapproved ‘extension’ of his mission: At one point, he’s sent to figure out the position of two battalions which the command post has not been able to get in contact with. Almost as soon as he makes it to the position where they’re supposed to be, he runs into the commanding officer of one of the battalions. The captain has hand-drawn maps of the position, which Jünger proceeds to copy. Mission accomplished, right? If you thought so, then you clearly don’t know Jünger. Because he decides then to head forward to the line headquarters anyways, where the fighting is thicker and the situation more dangerous (“the way was littered with dead, their pale faces staring up out of water-filled craters”), to “effect a personal reconnaissance.”

Ultimately, I suspect he is telling the truth when he says that he just got bored with following the same routine over and over in the trenches – hard as that may be to believe, with the constant shelling and shooting and such. He likes seeing new places (even if those places are being shelled), meeting up with old friends (even where the rest of their former unit are dead), and shooting at anyone in the wrong uniform (even when they shoot back), and mostly these things cannot be done while stuck in a single section of trench. My best guess is that the general amount of risk he faces every day is already so high that the additional risk he accrues by running around on extra self-assigned missions doesn’t seem like that much to him in comparison.

But let us return to the question of cultural differences between Jünger in WWI Germany (or, more accurately, occupied France) and us in modern-day America (or wherever else you may be, friends). Another interesting cultural comparison point is early twentieth-century firearms and weapons safety – or rather, the lack thereof.

Anyone today who uses firearms as part of their job or as a hobby is well aware of the procedures and checks necessary to safely operate a deadly weapon, and most take those precautions very seriously. Steps like checking to make sure a gun is not loaded before messing with it, or not pointing one’s gun at people one doesn’t intend to shoot, are pretty carefully adhered to.

In contrast, for German soldiers in WWI, safety culture is clearly just not a priority. The number of Germans Jünger sees get injured or killed by German weapons in the hands of Germans is not small. Some of this seems to be due to communication difficulties, a product of the chaos and confusion inherent in war, and I’ll discuss friendly fire more later. But many of these casualties seem like they could have been prevented by safer weapons-handling practices.

For example, Jünger relates stories of soldiers who die from fiddling around with unexploded shells and loaded guns – popular hobbies among those Jünger is posted with (“toffee-apple” is the slang name for a type of shell):

[An NCO] was fatally injured by a ‘toffee-apple’ that he had found. He had unscrewed the fuse, and, noticing that the greenish powder he tipped out was highly inflammable, he put a lit cigarette in at the opening. The mortar of course blew up, and he received fifty separate wounds.

Of course, not all who go in for such hobbies meet their end that way, at least not while Jünger knows them. But some seem to be tempting fate a great deal, such as this officer:

A rather alarming neighbour in this respect was Lieutenant Pook, who was housed by himself in a dugout in the maze of trenches behind our left flank. He had collected a number of enormous dud shells, and amused himself by unscrewing their fuses, and tinkering with them as if they were bits of clockwork. Every time I had to go past his lair I made a wide detour.

Or consider this “irritating” story Jünger relates:

One morning, as I lay half asleep in bed, a comrade came in to escort me to duty. We were chatting, and he was toying with my pistol, which as usual was on my bedside table, when he fired a shot that narrowly missed my skull. I have witnessed several fatal accidents in war that were caused by careless handling of weapons; cases like that are always especially irritating.

On the one hand, the prevalence of this incautiousness seems strange. Carelessness isn’t really a typical German stereotype. In comparison to the care they put into building their trenches, it even seems incongruous. Possibly, part of the cause could be that things like shells and grenades were new enough to general use, people hadn’t yet developed methods to deal with them safely. But this attitude seems to go beyond just grenades and guns. One wonders whether perhaps it’s just not a big enough deal to worry about shooting yourself or your buddies on accident, when there’s ten thousand enemy soldiers out there with guns trying to shoot you on purpose.

At least at the start of the war, Jünger is somewhat more cautious when handling weapons than many others. He isn’t one of the ones “tinkering” with dud shells. By the end of the war, though, his caution has apparently been thrown to the wind:

One afternoon, stepping out of my sector, I came upon several half-buried boxes of British munitions. To study the construction of a rifle-grenade, I unscrewed one, and took out the detonator. Something was left behind, which I took to be the percussion cap. However, when I tried to unpick it with my nail, it turned out to be a second detonator, which exploded with a loud bang, took off the tip of my left index finger, and gave me several bleeding wounds in the face.

This makes me think their nonchalance with weapons all is just part of a larger attitude of carelessness among the German soldiers as a whole. When it is so easy to get killed and people are dying every day, perhaps actions to protect your own life seem to become less important or worthwhile in comparison.

This seems all the more likely, when you realize their unconcerned attitude isn’t only related to unexploded shells and grenades: In one location Jünger is posted, there is a road leading back to the reserve line which is exposed to enemy fire. There is a ditch beside the road, and the soldiers traveling along it are supposed to walk in the ditch. But as Jünger observes, no one bothers to do this since it’s easier to walk in the road and most of the time they don’t get shot. But sometimes they do, and the losses, Jünger observes, “add up.”

At another point, Jünger’s company suffers casualties from doing trench-attack exercises using live hand-grenades. And on top of all of this, friendly fire is a real problem no one seems to do much to mitigate.

Perhaps, the background rate of casualties is just so high as to make the casualties from carelessness seem negligible – to both the individual soldiers, and to the institutions waging the wars.

Under this assumption, the safety procedures during peacetime make more sense. In wartime, it takes a lot for the individual risk from some personal hazardous activity to outweigh the background risk of getting shot by the enemy. But in peacetime, with no one shooting at you, you’re not likely to get shot at all unless you do something extremely careless or stupid. During WWI, even if carelessness was causing a solid number of gun and munition injuries, the relative fraction of injuries due to this cause probably just wasn’t significant enough to make the issue important.

Jünger, experiencing the massive risks surrounding him and somehow surviving despite long odds, seems to agree:

Peeping over Destiny’s shoulder like that to see her hand, it’s easy to become negligent and risk one’s life.

III.

But the standards for firearms and munitions safety are at least influenced by those in command – and if those in command don’t bother with standards, that sends a message. WWI German command apparently didn’t care about the problem – but did they even know a problem existed in the first place?

Perhaps not – from Jünger’s descriptions, communication between command, the infantry in the trenches, and the artillery, was not great. Some of this seems to have been caused by the massive confusion during battles, and the lack of the technology necessary to send messages back and forth in real-time. But some of it seems more epistemic.

On one occasion, Jünger describes getting told off by a general staff officer brandishing a map for various decisions he made in a recent battle, such as not turning right along a specific trench. But in Jünger’s earlier account of the battle, he was so turned around for most of it that he didn’t even know in which direction the German lines were, much less have the ability to pinpoint precisely which trench he was in.

And this is far from the only occasion where directions are an issue. In fact, Jünger seems to constantly be lost. Most every time he brings his platoon or company to relieve some other unit on the front line, he meets up with a guide. Invariably, that guide soon gets lost themselves, at which point they all come under heavy shelling. Everyone ducks for cover, the unit gets scattered, and Jünger spends the next several hours trying to gather everyone up again while locating their new position himself.

And the artillery seems to have just as much trouble finding where to shoot as the soldiers have finding where to defend – with the results just as deadly for the unfortunate infantry. Jünger describes multiple occasions where their artillery ends up shooting at their own instead of the enemy. And there are no cell phones to use to call up the artillery and tell them to please stop.

That is not to say, though, that there is no communication happening at all. Messengers are constantly sent back and forth – and sometimes Jünger even serves this function himself. Another time, Jünger describes using colored flares to send messages between separated attacking units. At another point, Jünger’s unit spreads out their maps and turns them upside down to signal to planes flying above how far into a section of enemy trench they have penetrated. And yet, despite these numerous and creative methods of signaling, they still seem to constantly take fire from their own artillery.

Communication surely isn’t helped by all the personnel changes, which often occur without any warning. This is likely inevitable in a situation where commanding officers are constantly dying or getting wounded, but the continual reassignments add to the overall chaos. Once, while serving as a platoon leader, Jünger wakes up and finds his company commander just gone – he has no idea where. Immediately after, he gets orders himself to take over another, different company. Thus, Jünger leaves his platoon and company to fend for themselves while he goes to find his new command. Who took charge of his old platoon, or his original company? Jünger never says.

Under these sorts of conditions, it takes people like Jünger, who are willing to adapt and make decisions when circumstances change and the original orders or plans no longer make sense, in order to keep everything going. At one point, Jünger is leading a company to fight an upcoming battle. The captain in charge has created a plan for a staggered attack, where the companies will attack in a certain order. But the captain gets injured before the attack, and when Jünger finally gets his company to the meetup point, half the other companies are missing, so he decides not to worry about the plan and has everyone all attack at once.

Sometimes, Jünger is the missing man: He describes coming back from an attack after being wounded and reporting to the battalion commander, only to be informed that he has already been reported dead. After relating this, Jünger remarks on how this wasn’t even the first time this had happened to him.

And all this confusion is just what results even when everyone is trying to work together in good faith. When personality clashes and officer politics come into play, the situation gets dicey indeed.

At one point, Jünger has to bring his company into another stretch of line, held by some companies he does not know. Apparently though, they’re not too pleased to have him in their territory, which quickly becomes apparent once he walks into their meeting to get his orders.

First, they try to make his company attack an hour earlier than the other two groups participating in the attack. However, Jünger successfully protest this, and gets his own attack time moved to match the others. But then, the other officers refuse to tell him the location of the trench he is supposed to be attacking, and he has to wander around the area with his company looking for it. In the process, they accidentally venture so far up a sap trench they almost run into the enemy then and there, and they have to quickly and quietly backtrack.

At first sight, it seems like the officers of these other companies must be cruel and horrible people – after all, they almost got Jünger and his men killed. But after some thought, one realizes that probably wasn’t their intent – they were just giving the new officer a hard time. It’s simply human nature to play petty tricks on perceived rivals. During peacetime, the worst these sorts of shenanigans result in is some inconvenience or embarrassment. In wartime, when the stakes are life and death, the consequences of a prank are similarly magnified.

But just because there is a war on, human nature doesn’t suddenly change overnight. Some things are the same anywhere, whether in the German trenches or twenty-first century American offices:

It’s a curious thing that even here other people remain the most popular subject of conversation. Trench gossip flourishes in these afternoon sessions, almost as in a small town garrison. Superiors, comrades and inferiors may all be subjected to vigorous criticism, and a fresh rumour makes its way through all six commanders’ dugouts along the line in no time at all, it seems.

IV.

Jünger’s descriptive writing style is part of what makes these discussions of personality conflicts and mishaps so interesting. But a book about the WWI infantry experience need not take this path. In comparison, Rommel’s Infantry Attacks, though containing many of the same ideas and attitudes as Storm of Steel, has a far more analytic style. Despite, or even because of, these authors’ similar ideological perspectives, marking the differences in their books will be all the more instructive.

A first difference, as mentioned before, is that while both authors are officers, and both their books include descriptions of infantry tactics, in Storm of Steel these sorts of sections are rare and brief, while in Infantry Attacks they fill most of the book and include figures and diagrams to boot. Jünger goes off on long narrative descriptions of what trenches or dead bodies looked like or smelled like or felt like. Rommel’s discussion is mainly confined to a direct narration of particular infantry engagements and his tactical analyses of them. Is writing this way just each author’s personal preference?

Perhaps in part, but this difference also goes back to each author’s purpose in writing in the first place, and their intended audience. These factors have deeper implications into the accuracy and honesty of their respective accounts as well.

Jünger is writing a memoir, where long passages of extraneous description and scene-setting are expected, to entertain a lay audience. In contrast, Rommel is writing to a military audience, and the high level of technical detail he includes is expected in that context, to make himself appear competent and to impress his superiors and bolster his likelihood of promotion.

On certain occasions, though, their tactical accounts disagree. Sometimes this can be chalked up to differences in the details of their positions, circumstances, and the period of the war in which their experiences came from.

For an example of this, Rommel stresses the importance of digging in when you move to any new position. Jünger, on the other hand, says he thinks the motivation of the soldiers defending the trenches matters more than their trenches’ depth or elaborateness.

But Jünger spends most of his time in long-entrenched positions, so it could well be the case that their preferred strategies are both optimal, just in different periods along the process of trench-digging. That is, maybe having a 5 ft trench is much better than a 3 ft trench, so much so that any difference in motivation of the men in said shallow trenches makes as no difference. But when you get to talking about deeper trenches, going from 15 ft to 20 ft makes only an incremental improvement in the defense, so that in this case having more highly-motivated men gives greater advantage than an additional 5 ft of depth. Then, if Rommel mainly encountered the shallow-trench situation, and Jünger the deep-trench situation, the differences in their observations would be explained.

Other differences require more explanation. In Rommel’s account, every order he gets is generally carried out, and little blame is laid at the feet of command. Friendly-fire is rare, and when it’s discussed at all, Rommel quickly explains how it wasn’t at all his fault. In Jünger, on the other hand, orders are often ignored, command is mostly to blame, and friendly-fire is omnipresent and shrugged off even when it results in deaths. Are we sure these men are describing the same army, fighting the same war?

Here is where the difference in our two authors’ respective purposes comes into play. Rommel doesn’t talk about all the issues Jünger does, because he can’t – not without risking offending command. This by no means indicates that Rommel didn’t personally have the sorts of experiences and complaints Jünger did – only that he was angling for a promotion, and couldn’t risk offending his superiors by including them. This difference is part of what makes Jünger so much more entertaining.

Jünger even goes so far as to talk almost directly about the spin he put on reports. For example, at one point an attack goes wrong and he and another lieutenant lose a machine gun in the enemy trenches. Command orders them to go and get it back. So they attack, but it turns out the other lieutenant, Schultz, has given the wrong range for the German machine guns providing covering fire. As they dodge bullets from their own side, Jünger is mad – at first. But then the artillery starts, and it turns out that Jünger has given the artillery the wrong range as well – so now they’re dodging their own artillery too. Still, they go ahead with the attack to try and retrieve the machine gun, but the English they had fought the previous time are gone, and they can’t find the gun – though, as Jünger says, “admittedly, we didn’t spend that much time looking for it either.” Afterwards, the two lieutenants discuss “the most important aspect of the affair: the report. We wrote it in such a way that we were both satisfied.” Admitting to covering up your mistakes implies also admitting to your mistakes – a vast difference with Rommel, who if he did make any mistakes, certainly didn’t include any reference to them in his own book.

Thus, when it comes to assessment of the mistakes made by command, or the actual situation of the infantry, I would trust Jünger over Rommel. Granted, Jünger may in some cases surrender to the urge to embellish his memoir for entertainment purposes. But this is a small influence compared to Rommel’s compulsion to exclude anything that would cast him or his superiors in a poor light.

Of course, that’s not to say there’s no preference in Jünger – we should expect him to be biased towards the infantry side, and blame his own mistakes on command or other units (human nature strikes again). But as far as how the infantry themselves felt about how things were going, he can still serve as a decent benchmark.

In fact, I trust Jünger here not only over Rommel, but also over modern fantasy authors who have never experienced trench warfare but include battles with a fair resemblance in their novels. Jünger can serve as a benchmark of accuracy there too.

To take one example, consider the battles in the second half of Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series. Sorcery aside, how realistic are these descriptions?

As far as descriptions and imagery go, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that Bakker took his inspiration from real accounts like Jünger’s, by actual soldiers in the world wars. The similarities are striking.

But I’m here to talk about differences, so differences we shall find. One of the big ones is friendly fire. That is, why aren’t the Schoolmen and the Swayali, which serve as a sort of magical artillery, constantly hitting the Ordealman infantry in their bombardments? Especially when Sranc and Ordealmen are mixed together, and with all the smoke of the Shroud obscuring vision (that much, at least, is very similar to Jünger’s accounts). In the Aspect-Emperor series, there are many mistakes made in the wars, and a certain degree of friendly fire, but most of that is due to tactical mistakes by those in command, or because of a few individuals going insane. Whereas in Storm of Steel, most friendly fire is from people getting turned around and shooting toward the wrong lines, having no clue what is even going on and just shooting at everyone who approaches, or else from misaimed artillery. (Though I would never suggest it to Jünger in person were I to meet him, I rather wondered whether some of the perpetual taking-fire-from-their-own-artillery was due to Jünger’s unit being in the wrong place, rather than the artillery being misaimed.)

Another difference is that Bakker’s armies always seem able to find each other, even when they get routed, and get back together in their groups and formations relatively quickly. In Rommel and Jünger, on the other hand, gathering up the fragments of units remaining after a rout requires quite a bit more work. Though even there, there are differences in Rommel and Jünger’s experiences.

Interestingly enough, both works include an account of a time their side lost an engagement badly, and a number of units involved got broken up and scattered. At which point, it fell to the narrating officer to gather up the men again into some kind of order, and fight back. (One starts to wonder how common of an experience this was at the time.) Both accounts of this are similar, with the main difference being the size of the potpourri unit each ends up in command of.

In Jünger’s case defending the Rattenburg, he ends up drafting people trying to flee until by the end he’s built up enough for his own little company. In Rommel’s case, he crosses the countryside gathering up the fragments of various companies until he has himself about half a battalion – at which point a more senior officer shows up and relieves him of it, to his clear disappointment.

The differences here, I think, speak to a personality difference between the two authors, in particular a difference in ambition. In Rommel’s case, he seems to take the duty upon himself because he enjoys being in command and leaps at any opportunity to do so. Jünger’s actions, on the other hand, were more out of desperate necessity, with him forcing fleeing soldiers to join him at gunpoint. “But I don’t even have a gun!” one protests, and Jünger responds, “Then wait till someone gets shot, and use his!”

This ambition disparity is confirmed when we look at their WWII records. In that war, Jünger doesn’t rise above the respectable-but-still-fairly-common rank of captain. Whereas, Rommel’s rise to the high position of field marshal is well-known.

Yet, while Rommel has many more tactical opinions, Jünger dares to try his hand at sweeping strategic analyses:

This was our first inkling of what was to be the Battle of the Somme. It marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war; thereafter, it was like embarking on a different one altogether. What we had, admittedly almost unbeknown to ourselves, been through had been the attempt to win a war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of matériel of the most gigantic proportions. This war in turn was replaced towards the end of 1917 by mechanized warfare, though that was not given time fully to develop.

I recall no analysis of similar breadth in Rommel.

V.

Another fascinating aspect allowed by Jünger’s narrative style is that we can observe the psychological effects the war has on the German soldiers, and on Jünger himself.

Of course, Jünger starts with militarism-based values that are already rather foreign to a modern reader. But does the war reinforce those values, or recast them?

He clearly believes he has an underlying creed guiding his actions:

Throughout the war, it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them.

And yet, his actions are inconsistent. Much of the time he does kill the enemy mercilessly, celebrating taking out another Englishman just as much as anyone. Sometimes he seems even more eager to the trigger, like the time he decides a soldier who had surrendered was taking too long in a dugout, so he just goes in and shoots him.

But then there are examples like the time he is chasing an officer, corners him, and is about to shoot him – until the officer takes out a picture of his family, and Jünger out of some sentimental urge lets him go.

Really though, expecting complete internal moral consistency from anyone, much less someone in the middle of a war, is unreasonable.

While I’m not sure how religious he was, if at all, Jünger seems to at least believe in providence of some sort. It is perhaps not surprising that he feels his survival has some divine element to it, considering how close he often comes to death. After surviving a near-miss, he says, “It is hard to see these things as completely random.” And yet, this has to be survivorship bias. The men who died in the grenade explosions, or got shot, or were in buildings that got shelled, or in the trenches where the English attacked, didn’t live to write books about it.

Jünger’s survival is miraculous in another respect as well, considering the number of times he is injured. Twice he describes surviving getting shot in the chest. The second time, he gets up and continues running away from the enemy, the entry and exit wounds from the bullet bleeding all the while, until he finds a medic who tells him he’s going to bleed to death if he keeps running about.

From his descriptions though, not everyone reacted the same way to being faced with a sudden and sustained high probability of death. There are certainly people whose response he finds admirable, like Lieutenant Brecht:

It was on that day that I got to hear the bad news of the death of Lieutenant Brecht, who had fallen in battle as a divisional observation officer in the crater field just right of the Nordhof farm. He was one of those few who, even in this war of matériel, always had a particular aura of calm about him, and whom we supposed to be invulnerable. It’s always easy to spot people like that in a crowd of others – they were the ones who laughed when there were orders to attack. Hearing of such a man’s death inexorably led to thoughts of my own mortality.

On the other hand, he says that some people just stopped caring about anything – in one case, he asks for directions from another soldier, who won’t bother to answer because they are under heavy shelling and he is one of those who has become apathetic about everything. Nevertheless, Jünger gets his directions:

As we hurried on, I called out for directions to an NCO who was standing in a doorway. Instead of giving me an answer, he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, and shrugged his shoulders. As I couldn’t stand on ceremony in the midst of this bombardment, I sprang over to him, held my pistol under his nose, and got my information out of him that way.

Ultimately, what changes Jünger’s attitude the most though is when he realizes that his side is losing the war. In all the previous conflicts, he is excited about going on attacks, even the ones where he thinks there is little chance of success and high chance of dying, like the time earlier-on he is told to take some volunteers and assault a stretch of the English trenches. But in his final battle, he describes the attack as a “mistake,” and by his tone you can tell he doesn’t want to be there anymore.

I suppose it is unsurprising that it is no fun to fight in a war when you know your side is about to lose. Morale is real (after all, isn’t the secret of war conviction?). Also, part of the decrease in motivation he experiences at the end could be due to the enemy propaganda attack he mentions, where the Americans drop leaflets encouraging German soldiers to desert. After his final battle, he describes ending up in the hospital after being injured – and nothing beyond that. That perhaps speaks the loudest about his attitude towards the events not mentioned. But ultimately, this is a war memoir, and after your side loses the war, what more is there to say?

VI.

Much has been written about WWI, of course, and I recognize that this one memoir is not the ultimate repository of truth about the time period. Yet still, to gain some understanding of what WWI was actually like, it’s more interesting and fun than reading a technical account like Rommel’s, or something like All Quiet on the Western Front that is just doom and gloom all the way down. Jünger, at least, is always finding the humor in his situation (and the alcohol – the latter often seems to help with the former).

For example, at one of the first postings Jünger comes to, their latrine is set up in a spot exposed to fire from the enemy lines:

Fifty paces behind the fortifications, in a rather poorly selected location, is our latrine – a long beam supported on two trestles over a ditch … the place, while not overlooked by the enemy, is still vulnerable to fire over the low rise. If they aim just over the ridge, the bullets pass through the dip at chest height, and a man has to lie flat on the floor to be safe. So it sometimes happens that in the same ‘session’, two or three times, more or less clothed, you have to measure your length, to allow a machine-gun burst, like a musical scale, to pass over your head. It’s the occasion for all sorts of ribaldry, of course.

The fact that no one thinks to move it, which Jünger complains about, is just yet another example of how their standards of acceptable risk are vastly different from those of peacetime.

And while Jünger sometimes gets annoyed with people not showing him the respect he deserves, when he has the means to address it, he can still have a sense of humor about it:

In Flers, I found my designated quarters had been occupied by several staff sergeant-majors, who, claiming they had to guard the room on behalf of a certain Baron von X, refused to make room, but hadn’t reckoned on the short temper of an irritated and tired front-line officer. I had my men knock the door down, and, following a short scuffle in front of the peacetime occupants of the house, who had hurried along in their nightgowns to see what the matter was, the gentlemen, or gentleman’s gentlemen, were sent flying down the stairs. Knigge was sufficiently gracious to throw their boots out after them.

Or, here’s my favorite description of heavy shelling:

“Air’s got a high iron content.”

Or finding creative solutions to cooling their machine guns:

Before long, every traverse had a light or heavy machine-gun behind it. With the help of these, we held the British end of the trench in check … Each time the cooling-water had evaporated, the canisters were passed around and topped up by a natural procedure that occasioned some crude humour. Before long the weapons were red-hot.

Storm of Steel is also interesting in that it includes some details of the development of tactics over the course of the war, and their effectiveness in practice. Jünger has a relatively advantageous perspective on this, having experienced almost the whole war through. This is enough that Jünger could come up with the overall strategic picture quoted in section IV, since he saw everything from the development of entrenched positions at the start, to tanks and airplane bombings at the end, and even the beginnings of propaganda ops that ultimately developed into the infiltration and intelligence strategies of the cold war.

One of the interesting things you don’t see at all is body armor, though Jünger on occasion does choose to wear a helmet – but only, as he says, when the shelling is really very serious. Nobody has body armor of any sort – an advancement that didn’t come into standard use (in the US) until after the US Vietnam war.

All this lends credence to a particular theory I ascribe to. Frontline soldiers in WWI included many very smart people, and while many died, some survived – and those that did survive were experienced in the extreme. And these people went on to analyze their experiences and the tactics they used, and come up with better solutions and tactics in the decades that followed.

So that then when WWII rolled around, these people who had been grunts or lower officers before were now the leadership. After surviving WWI, they had enough experience to know what they were doing, and had a couple decades between wars to chew over their experiences and come up with counters for what they had seen. This all resulted in an unusually high level of leadership competence during the later war. At least, that’s my theory as to how tactics and technology advanced so rapidly in WWII.

So to everyone who thinks WWIII will come along and be enough to end economic recessions and technological stagnation, you are wrong – you shouldn’t expect that kind of advancement again, really, until WWIV.

Sī vis prosperitātem, para bella.