Ernst Jünger - Storm of Steel

Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern is the original title) is one of the great books of World War I, if not the greatest. All sorts of trustworthy and unlikely people and trustworthy often precisely because unlikely: cosmopolites, left-wingers, non-combatants have stepped up to express their admiration, often in suitably embarrassed or bemused fashion: Boll and Borges, Enzensberger and Brecht, Gide and Moravia. In 1942, Gide wrote in his diary: 'Ernst Junger's book on the 1914 War, Storm of Steel, is without question the finest book on war that I know: utterly honest, truthful, in good faith.'

Its contrast with most of the others is stark. It has no pacifist design. It makes no personal appeal. It is a notably unconstructed book. It does not set its author and his experience in any sort of context. It offers nothing in the way of hows and whys, it is pure where and when and of course, above all, what. There is nothing in it about the politics of the war nothing even on its outcome and very little on the wider strategy of its conduct. It begins the moment Private Ernst Junger first detrains in France, on 27 December 1914, at the age of nineteen, with (though we aren't told this) a rushed school-leaving certificate and a couple of months' training behind him, having volunteered on 1 August, the opening day of the war. (It is hard to imagine an English autobiographer or belletrist a Graves or a Sassoon, amateur and holistic wouldn't have included that, or indeed the fact that the year before, as a bored romantic youth full of wanderlust, he had run away to Algeria to join the French Foreign Legion!) It ends, in one of a bare handful of scenes that are away from the action, back in Germany four years later, when he is too badly hurt to carry on, a decorated lieutenant and the youngest-ever recipient of the pour le Merite. War is all fighting is all everything else is cropped away. And, from first to last, in the affirmative. It is the work of a man whom the war made and who, in World War II, was to be again a professional soldier. It was published long before the likes of Blunden, Graves, Remarque and Sassoon, all of which appeared in the late 1920s, at a classic ten-year distance from the events they describe, giving their public and themselves time to recover; only Barbusse's novel Le Feu (Under Fire), from 1917, came out much before Ernst Junger's account was first privately printed with a local firm (the family gardener, Robert Meier, was designated as the 'publisher') in 1920, at the instigation of Junger's father. The impressively cumbersome original title was In Storms of Steel: from the Diary of a Shock Troop Commander, Ernst Junger, War Volunteer, and subsequently Lieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (73rd Hanoverian Regiment).

The initial print-run was 2,000, the intended readership presumably members of the regiment and other veterans, and the work, in literary terms, was undistinguished and at times, apparently hardly a surprise, considering its author's repeated rush to get out of school 'even fell short of the required standard for a sixth-form essay'. The 'diary' element, though never entirely suppressed later, was initially mostly all there was, closely following the sixteen notebooks Junger filled during the war. The book steadily sold through its small printings, but it wasn't the instant bestseller it is sometimes thought to have been. Junger was recruited by Mittler & Son, a noted publisher of militaria in Berlin, and wrote more books on the war, including the viscerally as well as headily unpleasant treatise On Battle as an Inner Experience (1922) of which I could not bring myself to read more than the excerpts I read years ago in a book on German history and a couple of spin-offs covering material from Storm of Steel in a more lingering and opinionated way: Copse 125 (1925) and Fire and Blood (1925). A shot at a novel, Sturm after one of the characters, nomen est omen was abandoned after a few installments. In the mid 1920s, then, Junger was already a prolific and established war writer before such a thing really existed. (His first non-war book, a memoir of his childhood, didn't appear until 1929.) Even so, acute observers were afraid they might lose Junger the soldier to literature. On balance, I suppose, that's what happened, but it's a close call. Junger has remained as much identified with World War I or war in general as with writing. I forget who it was who said they couldn't picture Junger the author at all except in uniform.