by Ernst Jünger
This explicit bloodlust is tempered by Jünger in later editions. Also gone is most of the generalizing and editorializing, much of it completely banal, as for example this sentence (earlier on in the same chapter): ‘No one who has lived through moments like these can doubt that the course of nations in the last resort rises and falls with the destiny of war.’ Gone too is the fanfare at the very end: ‘Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!’ I suspect that it was the awareness that he was now read by an international public, as well as tact and personal maturity and a sense of the prevailing levels of violence and irresponsibility in public speech in Germany, that acted on Jünger. His 1934 revision was dubbed the ‘quiet’ version by one recent critic. The impartial dedication, ‘For the fallen’, was new. Just as it was ironic that it was the most bloody and rhetorical version of Storm of Steel that was spread abroad, so it was ironic that the Nazis presumably had to content themselves with this one when they boosted the book at home, in the years of the Third Reich.
To me, the metamorphoses of Storm of Steel on its journey from fighting to writing principally go to show one thing: that this is an indestructible book, clear, trustworthy, close to events and full of matter. Already it has survived its author, whose best-known work it will, I suspect, remain. It has also, I have to say, survived Basil Creighton’s translation. In theory, it is always an advantage for a translator to be close to his original in time, and I imagine – though I don’t know – that Creighton would also have fought – but his knowledge of German was patchy, his understanding of Jünger negligible, and his book seems much older and staler than his original. There are literally hundreds of coarsenesses, mistakes and nonsenses in his translation; open it at just about any page and you start to find them. These range from trivial mistakes over prepositions like, ‘This typical forward movement made me sure that we were in for it till nightfall’ (my italics), whereas what Jünger means, evidently, is ‘that we were in for some action before nightfall’ (p. 277); to errors of sense, like the ‘unobtrusive’ blowing up of church towers, to rob the enemy artillery of landmarks, where what is meant rather is their ‘unceremonious’ blowing up (p. 133), in such a way that it almost occasions casualties, or his ‘airplanes tied with streamers’, which should have been ‘rosette-decorated aircraft’ (i.e., Royal Air Force planes) (p. 170); the loss of tone, as in a description of a type of shell being ‘different and far worse’, when Jünger’s typical bravado demands ‘altogether more exciting[ly]’ (p. 45), or Christmas being spent ‘in this miserable fashion’ (for ‘recht ungemütlich’), instead of the cooler and less plaintive ‘less than merry Christmas’ (p. 59); to a failure to recognize German figurative speech, so that he has ‘Unfortunately, the enemy was so plentifully supplied with munitions that at first it took our breath away,’ and not ‘Unfortunately, our opponents tended to have more munitions than ourselves, and so could play the game for longer’ (the German phrase is ‘einen langen Atem haben’, literally, ‘to have a long breath’, and hence stamina) (p. 66), or ‘We were soon beyond the zone of the light field guns and slackened our pace, as only a bird of ill-omen need expect to be hit by an isolated heavy,’ which is incomprehensible, unless you know what it means: ‘Before long, we were out of range of the light artillery, and could slow down, as the isolated heavy shells would only strike you if your number was up’ (p. 253), which revolves around the German ‘Pechvogel’, or ‘unlucky person or thing’. At the most entertaining extreme, it is the sort of ‘howler’ beloved of Classics masters, as in this sentence: ‘The pleasure of my return was dashed by an unexpected alarm which had for me the peculiarly unpleasant consequence that I had to ride the company charger to Beaumont.’ Was it really that bad? Creighton is only one letter out, but unfortunately, as it often does, it makes quite a difference: the German is ‘Gefechtstross’, not ‘Gefechtsross’. What Jünger actually had to do was ‘accompany the baggage train to Beaumont’ (p. 131). An instance of a silent howler, a kind of literary whimper – mistranslation shows more commonly as fatuity than disgrace – is the following passage in Creighton: ‘Streamers of black and white and red crossed the cloudless blue of the evening sky. The beams of the sunset dipped them in a tender rosy red so that they resembled a flight of flamingoes. We unfolded our trench-maps and spread them out to see how far we had penetrated the enemy lines.’ This is not a children’s party, or an – even for Jünger – unusually tender pastoral moment, rather it once again involves the air force:
The cloudless evening sky was crossed by a squadron of planes marked with our black, red and white. The last rays of the sun, which had already gone down, daubed them a shade of delicate pink, so they looked like flamingoes. We opened out our maps, and turned them face down, indicating to those above how far we had already pushed into the enemy line. (p. 249)
Creighton’s translation has had a good long innings, but I fancy it’s time it was retired.
If I might be allowed a couple of almost theoretical observations on what is a joyfully accessible and straight-ahead kind of book, I would like first to put the idea of a star shape in the reader’s mind. The characteristic focus and form, it seems to me, of Storm of Steel is just such an in-and-out, the points and capes, the nooks and spines. It is not actually the most tightly drawn book one can imagine: that would have made it a small circle. Jünger is able, for instance, to accommodate the record of his brother Friedrich’s ordeal at St-Pierre-Vaast; he generalizes beyond his own particular experience; he offers thoughts on the conduct of war, and of future wars; he does take us out of France and Flanders at moments; and, while the most characteristic depth of focus of the book is maybe ten yards or so – the interiors, the trenches and dugouts, the cars and lorries, the ruined houses, the beautiful, cultivated catalogues of war junk (like the one on p. 94) – still, there are also equally memorable distance shots, repeatedly of the sky, and of the colours and sounds of various ordnance, moments of eerie contemplation, like the background of a Renaissance portrait, and with just that in-and-out effect:
On the isolated heights on the way to Ransart was the ruin of a one-time estaminet – dubbed ‘Bellevue’ on account of the wide view of the front that was afforded from it – and that was a place I came to love, in spite of its exposed situation. From there, the view stretched over the dead land, whose defunct villages were linked by roads that had no traffic on them, and on which no living creature was to be seen. In the distance glimmered the outline of the abandoned city of Arras, and round to the right the shining chalk mine-craters of St Eloi. The weedy fields lay barren under the passing clouds and the shadows of clouds, and the tightly woven web of trenches spread its little white and yellow links, secured by lengthy communication trenches. From time to time, there was a puff of smoke from a shell, lobbed into the air as if by a ghostly hand; or the ball of a shrapnel hung over the wasteland like a great white flake slowly melting. The aspect of the landscape was dark and fantastic, the war had erased anything attractive or appealing from the scene, and etched its own brazen features, to appal the lonely onlooker. (pp. 38–9)
In terms of feeling, there is a similar story, describable in terms of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’: moments of resolute sang-froid and others of near-panic; being alone or with companions; being bored or in great danger or great exhilaration, that ‘wild, unsuspected hilarity’ he sees and feels in his first engagement (p. 24); anonymity and dandyishness, hebetude and exquisite sensitivity; nature and warfare; living in cosy near-domesticity and like animals in a hole in the ground. The same with the style, sometimes kept to the technicalities of a military situation report, and sometimes in the almost provocatively cultivated, French Symbolist notes on sound, colour, synaesthesia even, as in this notorious instance: ‘Frequently, yellow rockets were shot off that blew up in the air, and sent a rain of fire cascading down, of a colour that somehow re
minded me of the tone of a viola’ (p. 114). Throughout, the book seems to me to have a hard, inorganic edge, which is why I have the impression of a star, rather than, say, an amoeba. The scenes, for example, with Jeanne, the girl living by herself in her cottage, seem ruthlessly trimmed back; or the references to friends and fellow officers of Jünger, or to home and family, which are never allowed to get blobby and out of hand. As I’ve shown already, the accounts of trench-fighting or assaults are similarly more disciplined and restrained than they once were. Even the composition of the book, veering between the minimalism of probably authentic diary entries in the chapter on ‘Daily Life in the Trenches’, and highly polished, written-up pieces of description that evolved much later, follows the jaggedness of the star shape. This, it seems to me, is one of Jünger’s great freedoms and innovations.
The other is that, unlike any of the other World War I books I’ve read, Storm of Steel has found its way into natural epic form. The inspiration of most of the English books is lyrical or dramatic; they work with one-off contrasts and ironies; they fear repetition or excess of detail. They begin as they mean to go on, with misfortunes and reverses: Graves shelled by his own artillery; Blunden’s grenade instructor blowing himself up with a bad grenade; Sassoon breaking a leg while riding before he ever gets to France. There is something bleakly – bracingly – comic about all three. At the most, they are Entwicklungsromane, narratives of the accrual of experience and the development of character. (There is nothing comic about Jünger whatsoever, and his few instances of rough humour do little to further German claims in that department.) Storm of Steel leaves all that behind: otherwise we should have had the escape to Algeria and much more. Similarly the twos and threes and fives of poetic and dramatic form are left behind: who can count the number of scenes and episodes in Storm of Steel? Jünger’s first encounter with the war, after a few pages approaching it, is when the shell comes down in the gateway, and causes sudden carnage. There’s nothing subversive about it, and nothing personal. It’s not a book about survival, and I’ve never had that sense of that revelling (mistakenly) in one’s own indestructibility that the political critics of Jünger say is a hallmark of Fascist writing. (It is there in other books of his.) There’s a later, hyper-Nietzschean aphorism of Jünger’s that goes: ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger; and what kills me makes me incredibly strong.’
In the strangest way, Storm of Steel isn’t really a personal book at all – it’s about the war. In his World War II Diaries, there is this very suggestive idea: ‘War isn’t like a cake that the two sides divide up between them to the last crumb; there is always a piece left. That’s the piece for the gods, and it remains outside the argument, and it elevates the fighting from sheer brutality and demonic violence. Homer knew and respected it.’ Storm of Steel is about all of war, including that Olympians’ share. Even the form of warfare in World War I – a mutual or reciprocal siege – seems somehow suitable for epic. As in The Iliad, it can be difficult to separate the momentous and the routine; that too is perhaps in the nature of war. Thomas Nevin notes: ‘Marx had asked: “Is Achilles possible with gunpowder and lead?” Jünger had answered: “That was my problem.”’ Sometimes the progress seems slow and a little lumbering (Jünger’s time as an observation officer I remember as a particularly quiet phase of the book), at other times the horror and excitement come pell-mell. There is repetition, there is detail of every sort, there is an effort to integrate war into nature, a military pastoral, the alternation of day and night, rain and shine, the wheel of the seasons: ‘Each spring marked the beginning of a new year’s fighting; intimations of a big offensive were as much part of the season as primroses and pussy-willows’ (p. 141). All this is epic and celebratory. War and time and being are compounded into one great narcotic experience. (I could never understand, unless it was for doctrinal political reasons, why Sartre, asked about Jünger, said merely: ‘I hate him.’) At the same time, it’s possible to read Storm of Steel without falling in thrall to war; one may even feel strengthened in one’s pacifist convictions. It’s a fair book, not a tract, and over the years and revisions I suspect it’s become rather fairer. It has purpose – many purposes, even – but it’s not designing or conniving.
Much of this is due to the way it ends. There is real weariness – the weariness, one might even conjecture, of a much older man – and a profoundly elegiac feeling in its last chapters. This is not a mendacious or literarily contrived withdrawal – Jünger is still attending to what’s in front of him, and around him – but it is unexpected and, I think, deeply moving. It’s the epic giving way to the tragic:
The nights brought heavy bombardments like swift, devastating summer thunderstorms. I would lie on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass, and listen, with a strange and quite unjustified feeling of security, to the explosions all around that sent the sand trickling out of the walls. Or I would walk out to the fire-step to take in the mournful nocturnal scene, and the strange contrast between its heaviness and the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.
At such moments, there crept over me a mood I hadn’t known before. A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from this familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I 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. (p. 260)
It is still the Jünger repertoire, the contemplation, the casual fearlessness, the observation of huge and tiny things, the melancholy, the idea of the war-as-nature, the big metaphors, but with a new quality of introspection. (Though this too has a hard edge, it’s momentary and continent and underplayed.) It’s a moment of war-weariness, of taedium belli, surprising in such a one. For once, Jünger seems less like Achilles – sometimes he seems like Ajax – than like Hector. Influenza, enemy propaganda, bad food, silly accidents and foolish orders have all taken their toll, and twenty pages later, in the chapter called ‘My Last Assault’, there is what seems to me an utterly Homeric moment:
A figure in brown corduroy strode with equanimity across this fire-swept piece of terrain, and shook me by the hand. Kius and Boje, Captain Junker and Schaper, Schrader, Schläger, Heins, Findeisen, Höhlemann and Hoppenrath stood behind a hedge raked with lead and iron and talked through the attack. On many a day of wrath we had fought on one and the same battlefield, and today once more the sun, now low in the Western sky, was to gild the blood of all or nearly all.
[…]
It was our last storm. How many times over the last few years we had advanced into the setting sun in a similar frame of mind! Les Eparges, Guillemont, St-Pierre-Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Mœuvres, Vraucourt, Mory! Another gory carnival beckoned. (pp. 279–80)
Is this not majestic and surprising and beyond all contrivance in its sadness?
This is there ward of epic. A skimpier, less focused, less excessive, less varied and venturesome book would never have mustered the layerings of repetition and endurance sufficient to produce this sudden deepening, this sudden qualitative change. The summaries (that ‘hedge raked with lead and iron’) might have been news, the heightening of the tone pretentious, the hint of alienation coquettish or already threadbare, and, in the two Homeric catalogues, the names might have been those of ‘characters’, and the sites of the battles pretty indistinguishable. Can you tell this, can you write about this? women queueing outside Stalin’s prisons in the hope of seeing their sons and husbands asked the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, there to see her own son, and, for whatever reason, she could. Ernst Jünger, for whatever reason, over decades, learned to tell his story of World War I.
Michael Hofmann
February 2003
Gainesville, Florida
&nb
sp; In the Chalk Trenches of Champagne
The train stopped at Bazancourt, a small town in Champagne, and we got out. Full of awe and incredulity, we listened to the slow grinding pulse of the front, a rhythm we were to become mightily familiar with over the years. The white ball of a shrapnel shell melted far off, suffusing the grey December sky. The breath of battle blew across to us, and we shuddered. Did we sense that almost all of us – some sooner, some later – were to be consumed by it, on days when the dark grumbling yonder would crash over our heads like an incessant thunder?
We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Surely the war had to supply us with what we wanted; the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience. We thought of it as manly, as action, a merry duelling party on flowered, blood-bedewed meadows. ‘No finer death in all the world than …’ Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home!
‘Form up by platoon!’ Our heated fantasies cooled down on the march through the claggy soil of Champagne. Knapsacks, munition belts and rifles hung round our necks like lead weights. ‘Ease up! Keep up at the back!’
Finally we reached Orainville, one of the typical hamlets of the region, and the designated base for the 73rd Rifles, a group of fifty brick and limestone houses, grouped round a château in parkland.
Used as we were to the order of cities, the higgledy-piggledy life on the village streets struck us as exotic. We saw only a few, ragged, shy civilians; everywhere else soldiers in worn and tattered tunics, with faces weatherbeaten and often with a heavy growth of beard, strolling along at a slow pace, or standing in little clusters in doorways, watching our arrival with ribald remarks. In a gateway there was a glowing field kitchen, smelling of pea soup, surrounded by men jingling their mess-tins as they waited to eat. It seemed that, if anything, life was a little slower and duller here, an impression strengthened by the evidence of dilapidation in the village.