Storm of Steel

While stationed in dugouts near the Cojeul River, Jünger learns a great battle is coming, a “do-or-die offensive” (221). They spend weeks training for the offensive, then march to Brunemont, where the roads are choked with men and machinery preparing for the great battle.

What Jünger calls “the great battle” (224) starts, and immediately a shell lands among Jünger and his men. Afterward, as Jünger surveys the ruins, “a grisly chorus of pain and cries for help went up. The rolling motion of the dark mass in the bottom of the smoking and glowing cauldron, like a hellish vision, for an instant tore open the extreme abysm of terror” (225). This fear stays with Jünger. When ordered to the front, Jünger relates that“[a] wild animal dragged from its lair […] must have felt like us as we took our leave of the warm, secure dugout” (228).

After a heavy artillery barrage from German guns, Jünger and his men move forward: “The decisive battle, the last charge, was here. Here the fate of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the future of the world” (231). The Germans charge forward, encountering little resistance until they reach a high embankment. Jünger takes out a few machine-gun positions with hand-grenades, then his men swarm over, shooting down fleeing British.

As night falls, Jünger takes cover. The attack is halted by German artillery firing on their own men. All the next day the battle smolders, as Jünger puts it, until near nightfall, when Jünger’s men attack Highlanders—Scottish troops—and take the city. Jünger, wearing a British coat, is shot. He thinks himself dead, but the bullet passes clean through him. While trying to leave the battlefield, Jünger is wounded again, this time in the head. After reaching the hospital and being treated, Jünger is shipped back to Berlin.