I know I’m cutting it close. I have real-life things I’m dealing with right now that are just a little more important, so bear with me. And wait a week or so for the details on those.
History
Title: The Storm of Steel
Author: Ernst Jünger (tr. Basil Creighton)
Genre: Military History/Autobiography
Year: 1920 (tr. 1929, reprinted 2019)
War is one of the most pointless and wasteful endeavors humanity has ever invented. And World War I was quite possibly the most pointless and wasteful of them all. But the tens of millions of men fighting in the trenches of France, the mountains of Italy, or the dozen other fronts didn’t think so.
They believed they were fighting for a righteous cause, and that cause was, to put it simply, nationalism. The French fought for France, to throw back the invasion. The Germans fought for Germany, for the Kaiser’s honor and to right the wrongs of 1870. The Americans, latecomers as we were, fought to show that America belonged on the world stage.
Much has been written about the strategies of the war, of the machines and machinations it spawned. I could fill my room with accounts of the Central Powers and the Allies, of the 40 years of alliances and deals that led a simple assassination to set the whole world ablaze. (I even read one of these, The Guns of August, last summer.)
As well, reams of paper and gigabytes of now-digitized data can paint the tactical picture. Which divisions went where, which trenches were attacked when. What happened each time new technology entered the battlefield, whether tanks, airplanes, or gas attacks. There’s so much information out there that Indy Neidell could make a 10-minute video for each week of the war, and he almost never went into any more than the most cursory detail.
But so much media—and, therefore, so much public perception—focuses on these high-level accounts, these broad, sweeping depictions of trench warfare as a new variant of Risk, that we forget a very important truth. These were soldiers, not pawns. Men, not machines.
We know the Kaisar and the Tsar. We know Hindenburg and Ludendorf, Foch and Joffré. We know Winston Churchill before his later glory days. But we don’t know much about the millions upon millions who served under them, the unnumbered dead buried in unmarked graves throughout the French countryside, or the ones who made it home and got to see the world turn upside-down. Only a scant few heroes ever rise enough to make a dent in the public consciousness: Alvin York and the Red Baron are probably the only two the average American can even name.
Ernst Jünger tells the story of these forgotten masses through his own experiences of the war. He’s German, and that means two things. One, since he writes from his post-war home, his narrative is laced with the knowledge that his side lost. Two, his is a story not often heard in Allied countries. Some of that is through ignorance. Some comes from outright malevolence.
Jünger served through almost the whole war, showing up in early 1915 and taking his final action only a few weeks before the armistice. His tale winds through 18 chapters, but only a few actual battles. He was at the Somme, for instance, just as one of my favorite authors had been. He took part—indeed, showed heroism—at Cambrai and during the Germans’ last great offensive in 1918.
His is an account of the war from a small perspective. Never rising higher than lieutenant, he wasn’t invited to division-level strategic conferences. He didn’t know what the Kaiser was thinking. And that’s what makes The Storm of Steel so impactful. Here is the account of a soldier. This is a man who didn’t have the whole story. All he knew was that Germany was fighting, he was German, and he was honor-bound to defend his home. Even if they were the attackers.
It’s an almost too-simple belief system, we might think today. Our society has been conditioned over the past 80 years to reject nationalism. Indeed, national pride is outlawed in some of the same countries that were victorious over Jünger’s 73rd Fusiliers, and he would weep with the knowledge that his glorious Fatherland wants to ban the only political party that remembers what it used to be.
World War I marked a change in the way warfare itself was done. It marked the last true use of cavalry, and the first of a mechanized military. But it also illustrates how the culture of war changed in modern times. We know of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when hostilities paused for one night on the Western Front, and the soldiers of the respective sides greeted each other in No Man’s Land. Something similar happens to Jünger’s unit in 1915, and he recounts that he and the British commander finished the night by formally re-declaring war.
That might not make sense. They were already at war, weren’t they? And they didn’t have the power to stop it. But this is Ernst Jünger’s central theme: honor. The soldier, he believes, should have a sense of honor. As a good Prussian man, he felt he could best illustrate by doing, and his narrative accounts in the book are full of asides about which actions were honorable and which were the mark of a coward. He’s his own biggest critic, too, pointing out where he failed to live up to the standard he set for himself, even when it made no difference at worst, or saved his life at best.
Honor is dead, according to the Sanderson book I read last year. In the real world, we would probably consider it on life support. But World War I gives us our last good look at battlefield honor in action. Part of that is because of the parties involved. The English and German soldiers were cousins, in a sense, while the French were neighbors. Yes, they had names for each other (I actually didn’t know "Tommy" was the German nickname for British soldiers until I read this book!) and traded insults, but they did so in the knowledge that they were fighting…fellow men.
After WWI, that changed. Propaganda was able to reach the critical levels of today. Even by World War II, not even two full generations after Versailles changed the world, dehumanization through mass media had already begun its work, and the 80 years since have only made things worse. This has even altered perceptions of the Great War itself; The Storm of Steel is considered a dangerous book by leftists, precisely because it shows what a German patriot believes. And we all know that German patriots are evil, right?
In the end, this was not the book I wanted to read this summer. I was sick all week, I saw it on my tablet, and I dove into it during my convalescence. And I’m glad I did, because it really is a great book about what, I must admit, has always been my favorite war from a historical perspective. Ignore the people claiming that it’s fascist, or that it promotes Nazism. Ernst Jünger doesn’t do any of that. All he does is tell it like it is. Soldiers fought for four years, killing each other by the millions, because they believed they were part of something greater than themselves. The reason that sounds crazy to us is simple: we just don’t believe that anymore.