I started my summer reading with Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger. It was a birthday gift from my brother and an excellent addition to my library. It is the wartime diary of the youthful Ernst Junger during World War One, he is fighting for Germany and offers a soft handed banker like me a very fascinating and moving look into the complex nature of war. The first page had me hooked, “We were enraptured by war. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Surely the war had to supply us with what we wanted: the great, the overwhelming, the hallowed experience.” Throughout the book Junger is straightforward about the gruesome images he takes in without mixing in much or any philosophical or spiritual jargon. For example he writes, “In the morning, the sentry on our left flank was shot through both cheekbones. The blood spurted out him in thick gouts. And, to cap it all, when Lieutenant von Ewald, visiting our sector to take pictures of sap N barely fifty yards away, turned to climb down from the lookout, a bullet shattered the back of his skull and he died on the spot. Large fragments of skull were left littering the sentry platform.” We are able to see Junger’s climb through the ranks of the German army while he guides us through battles. His resolution and honesty was something I quite frankly admired page after page. Junger lays out death as ever present, “It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants of being hit.” The whole book enraptures you in the moment with Junger and is a true page turner. I felt like I got to know him better than I know most people in my life. That is the real power of books especially memoirs like this one. They become written friends, they are forever etched in your memory and you are able to draw all sorts of lessons from them in your daily life. Storm of Steel is a must read, it is a must read for young men today to remind us of the past and what many of our forefathers witnessed firsthand. It shows the brutal and strange beauty of warfare.
Written by: Michael McPhail
Ernst Junger 1918
Brains and Brawn 