Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger & Michael Hofmann

Author:Ernst Jünger & Michael Hofmann
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Europe, World War I, lit_guide, Literary, Germany, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 9780142437902
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2004-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

These idyllic positions have the one drawback that one's superior officers like to visit them, which is a great dampener to the cosiness of trench life. That said, my left flank, posted against the already 'nibbled at' village of Bellenglise, had no shortage of fire to complain of. On the very first day, one man was hit by a shrapnel in the right buttock.

On hearing the news, I rushed to the scene of the misfortune, and there he was, happily sitting up on his left, waiting for the ambulancemen to arrive, drinking coffee and munching on a vast slice of bread and jam.

On 25 May, we relieved the 12th Company at Riqueval-Ferme. This farm, formerly a great landed estate, served each of the four companies in the position alternately as base. From there, units went out to man three machine-gun nests positioned in the hinterland. These diagonally positioned support-points, covering each other like chess pieces, represented the first attempts in this war at a more supple, variable form of defence.

The farm was a mile at the most behind the front line; even so, its various buildings, dotted about in a rather overgrown park, were still completely unscathed. It was also densely populated -dugouts had yet to be created. The blooming hawthorn avenues in the park and the attractive surroundings gave our existence here an intimation of the leisurely country idyll that the French are so expert at creating - and that, so close to the front. A pair of swallows had made their nest in my bedroom, and were busy from very early in the morning with the noisy feeding of their insatiable young.

In the evenings, I took a stick out of the corner and strolled along narrow footpaths that went winding through the hilly landscape. The neglected fields were full of flowers, and the smell grew headier and wilder by the day. Occasional trees stood beside the paths, under which a farmworker might have taken his ease in peacetime, bearing white or pink or deep-red blossoms, magical apparitions in the solitude. Nature seemed to be pleasantly intact, and yet the war had given it a suggestion of heroism and melancholy; its almost excessive blooming was even more radiant and narcotic than usual.

It's easier to go into battle against such a setting than in a cold and wintry scene. The simple soul is convinced here that his life is deeply embedded in nature, and that his death is no end.

On 30 May, this idyll was over for me, because that was the day Lieutenant Vogeley was released from hospital, and resumed command of the 4th Company. I returned to my old 2nd, on the front line.

Two platoons manned our sector from the Roman road to the so-called Artillery Trench; a third was at company headquarters, some two hundred yards back, behind a little slope. There Kius and I shared a tiny plank lean-to together, trusting to the incompetence of the British artillery. One side was built into the downhill slope

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