First edition in 1920, final revised edition in 1961, translated in this form in 1978, Penguin Classics, 289 pages

For weeks I have been waiting until my energy was high to write a review of Storm of Steel—the best of the sixty plus war memoirs I have read—in such a way as to do it justice. It is honestly beyond me, as Ernst Junger, the author, was a genius level writer, who went elegantly insane as he was fed into the muddy meat-grinder known as the Western Front. He survived with 14 major wounds, including head shots from high-powered rifles, and thereby paid the hideous price of seeing virtually all of those he knew and cared about killed by an apocalyptic war machine that no one had correctly predicted, even as they labored to build the ghastly edifice that ate the economic production of 100 years in 4.

I was wondering, walking to work last night, what nonfiction I should write today. Then the sky sucked up electric static and split with a crackling roar that made me want to believe in an ancient God. That was the loudest thunder and lightning I have heard in 50 years. It sounded at one point as if dumpsters were falling from the sky. Despite my knowledge that I was in scarce danger I flinched when each heavy punch hit the earth. For 15 minutes I got to experience a part of what this man had experienced for years, only the thunder and lightning was aimed at him, from front, back, both sides, and above.

That was it. Ernst had used no fewer than a dozen metaphors to describe the storm-like and impersonal fury of the war machine, through the guts of which he passed years. The title, Storm of Steel, is among the best. There was also ‘a demented fury’, ‘an oceanic roar’, ‘in this place where Death danced’, ‘on many a day of wrath’, ‘in the shadow of Death’, and others.

My least favorite movie franchise is Star Wars, primarily because of the cartoonish dehumanization of the ‘storm troopers.' In Anglo-American mythology WWI was Germans sitting in cozy trenches machine-gunning waves of Tommys and Dough Boys. In reality it was an artillery duel, a manmade force that turned a bucolic countryside into something that looks like the world of the Terminator movies after Skynet takes over.

The counterpoint to this victory propaganda was the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, every passage of which is supported by Ernst’s more clinical narrative. Ernst describes what it was like to be a combat infantryman in WWI in colorful detail and gray apathy, including the parties in the reserve area and being blown out of a trench. He describes ‘moving in Indian file’ as Native American wilderness tactics were adapted by the Germans to negotiate this manmade wilderness. He describes the ‘orphans of Douchy,’ two pitiful French boys, with a compassion that was not very ‘hunnish.’ He recalls Indian troops believing that they would be executed, as they had been subject to British propaganda.

Both sides actually coveted prisoners and put bounties out for them so that they could be interrogated, as intelligence was so poor at the time. They were using balloons, not satellites. In major actions prisoners could not be taken as there was no safe way to get them back through the artillery, and, with most of the advancing force already turned to hamburger, there was no one left to guard them. In normal circumstances combat resembled constant raiding by primitive groups of hunters as the angry gods rained down hellfire. Ernst had a very low opinion of the German artillery, who once wiped out most of the company he was leading, and killed many of his friends. He was also a victim of friendly fire.

As for the ‘storm troopers’ those were not the great waves of Arуan warriors that both lovers and haters of the later German military conjured up in their overactive revisionist imaginations. Storm troopers were specially trained volunteers [Ernst being one of the first training officers] who were taught to fight like American Indians of old [Ernst later wrote some westerns] and were used for local infiltrations and as the spear-tips of massive ad hoc formations in major actions. Storm trooper units were essentially suicide squads. Hardly any of them lived to do it a second time.

From Storm of Steel to Star Wars we go from a real world where a captain cries his eyes out in a bloody ditch because he has just lost the last of his 160 men—who were all alive moments ago—and then going on to die himself, to fantasy storm troopers dying comically for an evil cause.

We go from another officer who is carried to the rear by one man after the other, who know they will be shot out from underneath him, because they love him, and he is ‘lucky’ having survived many wounds, and for him to die would shatter their hope, to a space pirate cracking jokes while he offs more faceless storm troopers.

I never liked those action scenes. I would find them offensive after reading about what it was like to be a real storm trooper. Before you think I am reading too much into the Lucas franchise, recall that the bad guy helmets were modeled after the steel helmet that saved Ernst on a few occasions.

Junger obviously went insane a year into the war. He became so used to the constant exploding ecosystem in which he was the equivalent of a rat in an earthquake, that he began to enjoy it. He collected bombs and took them apart and tinkered with them, sunbathed in shell craters, drank wine before a window while the house he was in was being targeted by artillery, walked through a meadow that was being turned into exploding mud picking flowers, and even slept in a house as it was being destroyed by bombs, and was dug out of the rubble by his men the next day, still sound asleep! He might have lost his rational material-based and mortality-based mind, but through these acts clearly preserved his soul.

There was one supreme battle that was totally insane, in which masses of German soldiers charged to their death through machine gun and artillery fire, in which Ernst was shot by his own man for wearing a captured British coat [he had a cold after all]. Much of Ernst’s deep understanding of men under extreme circumstances, of men bonding, comes together in his narration of this insane and pointless battle for a vast cratered moonscape, that, after the morrow’s bombardment, would appear to be a very different vast crated moonscape, that had ‘not a single blade of grass’.

These men had been shot in the head and blown up by bombs one-at-a-time for three years. They were ready to die together, doing something other than sitting in the mud waiting to become part of it. That battle should be shot as a full length movie, from both perspectives. In fact, Ernst received mail after the publication of his book from an enemy soldier who admitted to being ‘that guy’ and was glad that Ernst had lived.

Ernst goes into detail about living conditions, minor personal quirks of men who soon passed, and such subjects as the value of having a mixed background among your troops so that there might be plumbers, carpenters, engineers, etc., on hand to get creative with the unforgiving environment.

Here are some of his passages concerning men in the worst possible form of combat:

“…the most cautious man and the most carefree” [on the randomness of survival in war]

“…brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards”

“We had looked into a mirror.” [on the enemy]

One gets a growing sense as he reads on that Ernst only cared that his fallen comrades would be remembered. He was the ideal civilian soldier: loyal, efficient, respected the enemy and valued intangibles like honor that he knew to be the pillar of sanity in such circumstances, and wished that men would never have to walk the paths that he and the fallen had. He decries scorched earth defensive tactics as ruinous for troop morale.

Much of the book is a series of character sketches of men of whom nothing—not even a stitch of uniform—might have remained a minute after having their last conversation with the author. His survival guilt is palpable and drives his narrative to high art.

Some have postulated that the Germans did so will against such odds for so long because they were superior, others that they were led by geniuses, others that they had better weapons, and still others—including many evil men—that they were proud pure Europeans of the Nordic strain, who fought with a particular fury against the many-colored mongrel hordes that the French and British and American empires brought to the battlefield from around the world. Ernst puts the lie to this notion when he praises the high quality and humanity of the enemy—colored colonial troops included. There was no hatred for the enemy, just a mutual respect for he who you were trying to kill because he too, was sharing your hell, and would be the only one that understood. No wonder Ernst declined Hitler’s overtures. He comes off as the farthest thing from a political animal that one could imagine.

If you could only read one war memoir, Storm of Steel should be it. If a man could emerge from that as a compassionate artist who made peace with his horrid lot, than Man has more potential than a lot of us give him credit for. As Ernst wrote, just after most everyone he knew had been blasted into mudmeat taking a ditch that would soon be abandoned, “Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it.”

The parting notion that Ernst left me with was that he had stood in a human burrow that was being plowed by machines that were multiplying, growing, and improving at a frightful pace. In Ernst Junger’s war Man was a bystander at his own execution. It is no wonder that he later predicted drones in ‘The Glass Bees.’