Storm of Steel

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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.

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