Storm of Steel

All Quiet on the Western Front ranks as the definitive anti-war novel of World War I, perhaps for all wars, and to some the most important war novel of all time. It was widely banned in the inter-war period yet went on to sell more than 20 million copies and has three film adaptations, the most recent the acclaimed 2022 version. It's so famous, so prominent, so dominating, that the novel I think is the best war novel ever written can only point back at it from a 'see also' link on Wikipedia. That novel is Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger.

You may recognize that name from 2023’s ACX book review, On the Marble Cliffs. It was my first serious look at Jünger as well; he is described as a “serial killer” and a “sociopath,” the kind of modern psycho who nowadays would take glee in uploading videos of drones blowing people up, someone perhaps who sees war as the chance to visit death upon human beings with the state’s permission. I had heard of Storm of Steel, heard the acclaim for it, but never read any of his works. What kind of man was this?

The Wikipedia page is light on details, but it’s beyond impressive^[1]. Jünger fought throughout World War I in the thick of it, starting as a private and ending as a company-commanding Lieutenant. He saw action at the Somme and Cambrai, the Battle of Arras then the Third Battle of Ypres and finally the Ludendorff Offensive. He was wounded 14 times, sometimes quite severely, and came out of it with the Pour le Mérite (the most prestigious Prussian officer’s decoration) alongside numerous other awards. Storm of Steel is, basically, his diary of his time in the war. After the war he was a very famous writer, and if you want to know more about him you should read the previous ACX review which covers his story more and is interesting in its own right.

So there was nothing to do but read it myself. Storm of Steel is not a very long book by page count. What I will call it is dense. It is not a diary that Jünger used to explain his theories, his ideas or his politics except as cursory asides. It is a book about WAR, hundreds of pages of it, from the mundane to the bloody to the idyllic. Storm of Steel is, in my humble opinion, the best war novel ever written.

I did not say that it is the best _anti-_war novel; I also did not say that it is a _pro-_war novel, although in some places and versions Jünger claims war can be glorious or make someone stronger in a rising-to-the-challenge sense. It is at its core an account of a war, a war more bloody and terrible than any of us could imagine, written by someone intelligent and gifted in writing who happened to see much of it and survive to tell the tale. It is by turns harrowing, riveting, insightful, terrifying, humorous, disgusting and soul-shaking. I had read All Quiet and Storm of Steel years ago, and for this review I read both again, then got a different version and translation of Storm of Steel to read it yet again; I can say that it was all worth it. There is nothing like it, and I hope that nothing like it will come ever again.

The Elephant in the Room

If you will forgive me a meme, if I had a nickel for every German World War I war novel I read that featured a bug-collecting protagonist who drank oily machinegun water during an attack, I’d have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, let us truly begin. I opened with All Quiet on the Western Front for a reason: you probably know about it, and it’s also a German infantryman’s perspective of World War I. All Quiet also describes the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a veteran serving for years, of seeing death and destruction around every corner, breaks up its action with humor and levity, and ends with the war. The comparison is natural.

The truth is that All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction with a thesis. It covers nearly three years, but Remarque was only on frontline duty for about five weeks. It’s unlikely that Remarque ever participated in the actual combat he describes: an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes his service as mostly rear-area construction work; certainly dangerous, he certainly lived through shelling and gas attacks, and it’s a matter of record that he was wounded, but he probably didn’t see the relentless action he describes in All Quiet.

Storm of Steel was first published in 1920, while All Quiet came in 1929. Remarque was aware of this other famous account of World War I in his own language. I open with the bug-collecting and drinking cooling water because it’s those sorts of shared details that popped out to me after reading them both^[2], but Jünger was an independently-famous entomologist and a stormtrooper commander and Remarque was not. He was on the periphery of such things, and between his time at the front and his time in the hospital, I’m sure he experienced enough and met those who did experience the combat he describes to create the agonizing story, but Remarque was justifiably reticent about discussing his own war experiences or explaining himself.

All Quiet intersperses brief periods of combat with long scenes of Paul returning home, of soldiers discussing how it’s really the leaders who should fight^[3], of how training is miserable^[4] and the food is lousy^[5] and so on. It pontificates about the causes and horrors of war, about the damage it does to one’s psyche and soul, about how it makes men who should be brothers into sincere enemies, how it alienates the soldier from the civilian; it crafts a story for you to do all that. But it is a craft, and I think that detracts from its power.

Storm of Steel is true. It really happened, and it reports those happenings with minimal commentary. Many books start with an idea and write a world around them; Atlas Shrugged is a vehicle for getting the reader to an 80-page monologue about Objectivism. All Quiet is in that vein; it wants you to be anti-war, to feel the horrors of it, to know the unfairness, the blundering and chaos and death. It starts with the conclusion and works its way backwards. Storm of Steel works the other way around, describing it as it happened and drawing conclusions from that, but it barely draws anything itself and instead lets you do it, with barely a suggestive nudge. If you want to be pro-war, Storm of Steel will satisfy you with heroism and duty and camaraderie in the face of noble adversity. If you want to be anti-war, it will satisfy you with horror and futility and bloodiness in the face of a cruel industrial war machine. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, banally, you will hear about tasteless food and unceasing work and moments of absurdity and silly training. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, notably, you will hear about impossible situations and near-misses then grievous wounds and feats of daring and moments of sheer, unadulterated terror tempered by steely courage. If you want a few jokes, it even has some of those^[6]. But above all, Storm of Steel offers one man’s true and unflinching account of The Great War, and what an account it is!

Versions

One last, brief aside before diving into the novel. Although it was originally published in 1920, Jünger revised the book throughout his lifetime, with the last edition coming in 1961. Translations vary too; Creighton’s translation from 1929 of the 1924 version is certainly a worse job than Hofmann’s of 2003 (of the last 1961 version), but Creighton was an English World War I veteran writing much closer to Jünger while Hofmann is a German native writing with 80 years of history built up. The early version I think is more raw, but also contains more commentary by Jünger, more nationalism and militarism, than the later version after World War II that is more refined and reflective and muted. I recommend the 2003 Hofmann translation that is more generalist and polished but less assertive, but the 1929 one is certainly still good, just unpolished and unapologetic. I quote from Hofmann’s translation unless noted otherwise.

Storm of Steel

Jünger opens Storm of Steel as a naive private headed to Champagne in January 1915. He is wounded in action, sent back for officer training and becomes a lieutenant, and in 1916 he takes command of a platoon before the Battle of the Somme. Here, he is wounded again, recovers, and returns to duty. In January 1917, he attends a company-command course and takes over running a company for the retreat from the Somme. This is about 40% of the way through, so for the next 160 pages or so we cover two years of fighting on the Western Front until he is finally wounded in August 1918 and the war ends. The book, as a memoir, is basically without plot or structure, following his life and actions throughout the time with brief asides to give updates on surrounding events, but it is extremely focused. It is all concise and directly related to him; it’s not just a collection of war anecdotes^[7], but it doesn’t have a central theme or plot. It is life on the front from beginning to end. Jünger does not take chapters to describe his leave or training, it’s all centered on and around the campaign.

But it’s not all action, and Jünger digresses constantly. He says so himself: “Of course, I was telling you about trench duty. But one loves these digressions; it’s an easy matter to start nattering, to fill up a dark night and the slow hours. I would many times stop and listen to the tales of some character from the front, or a fellow NCO, and take in his chatter with rapt attention.” He goes to rear service sometimes, and gets called into drinking parties with sector commanders in mock royal courts. He is one of the first commanders to implement the Stoßtruppen (stormtrooper, in English) tactics which focused on small-scale unit attacks instead of mass infantry assaults to break the trench stalemate, then leads a raid that ends with most of his soldiers dead or captured. He goes on a wild escapade with his comrades in a stolen French carriage, until, without brakes, it crashes in the hills of Lorraine. He talks about his time in the military hospitals, and takes moments to discuss the character of the soil in different locales, a surprisingly critical detail when you’re digging trenches. In the middle of the assault, his medal falls off, and he searches for it in the grass with his assistant’s aid while under fire in the field. Interspersed with it all though is the combat, the unrelenting artillery and small-arms fire, the constant watching and circling by enemy airplanes, the occasional sortie into no-mans-land or a raid of the enemy trench. And the deaths; so many dead I think we have no modern conception to reckon with it.

Why is Storm of Steel the best? What makes it worth reading? What would someone not that interested in war or World War I get out of it?

• It's not a literary masterpiece per se, but it is interesting, with well-written and pleasant prose.
• Jünger recorded the course of the war fairly faithfully; if you want to see what World War I was like, at least in one small area, there’s no better option.
• It is mostly anti-polemic, focusing on the war itself rather than ideas around or about it.
• He was at the tip of the spear for years, and we can watch the methods change throughout the course of the novel.
• He fought in some of the most important battles of the Western Front.
• He started as a private and moved up to company commander, giving us both the narrow- and wide-scope perspectives.
• The Anglophones won both world wars, and this colors our perspective of them. Storm of Steel gives us the other side of (one) war.

In short, Storm of Steel is the epitome of the “standard” war novel; there’s nothing so magical or ground-breaking in it, but it does everything and so well that it elevates it above any peer, like the Game of the Century using the same pieces as any other chess game to make a masterful performance. I want to emphasize that last point above. An American war novel, in context, is from the winning (or at least non-losing) side. E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed goes through the brutal Pacific island-hopping campaign, and ends with:

Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country–as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.

The context here is in 1981, with an America that had many issues but had survived and was still comparatively prosperous. The message was that the sacrifice had been worth it. But Jünger doesn’t get to do this. He watches Germany become the Weimar Republic; he is first revising in the 1920s, Germany has lost its empire and the Kaiser is exiled, communists are sprouting everywhere (the Bavarian Soviet Republic was just a few years ago), Germany is under humiliating peace terms (the Saarland was still occupied, then the Ruhr in 1923), and the economy is undergoing hyperinflation as he is revising it. How does he end Storm of Steel in 1924?

Now these too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of fresh ones [battles]. We–by this I mean those of the youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal–will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!

I can see why Hitler would like it and send him fan mail. After this, he watches the rise of the Nazis. He sees World War II. He participates, but only tangentially; he is disgusted by the Nazis, he sees how they treat Jews in occupied France and works to save some of them, he watches Germany destroyed and its remains split by the war and the Iron Curtain fall. He revises Storm of Steel in 1961, and this time he omits the nationalism; the book ends a few paragraphs earlier, with the notice that he receives the Pour le Mérite.

Jünger was a soldier who watched nearly everything he cared about destroyed. The Kaiserreich was killed, then the Weimar government danced on its grave, then what he so held dear was resurrected like a horrifying zombie to pervert the core of his ideals, wearing his conservatism like a skin suit in mockery, then he watched that get put down, cremated and the remains scattered. Jünger revising in 1961 is far more reserved, more limited in his diversions of honor and duty. But he still says, on his way to a hospital after his first injury:

At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives.

The Theme of Storm of Steel

Jünger saw war beyond our wildest nightmares. The experience occupied a central portion of his mind, and he carried it for the rest of his life; what did he say about it? Mostly, he talked about death.

It is bursting at the seams with killing and destruction, with constant shelling and fighter attacks and enemy fire and grenades; death comes swiftly, suddenly and unexpectedly over and over. When I say that it makes a good anti-war book, I mean it; I counted 45 explicit deaths that he witnessed and mentions over the course of the book, times where “this man here dies,” and there are many times that number again in listed deaths as a general event (we lost X men this day, Y many men died from a shell here)^[8]. The worst example is when his company takes cover in a shell crater moving up to the front:

“There was another whistle high up in the air. Everyone had the choking feeling: this one’s headed our way! Then there was a huge, stunning explosion – the shell had hit in our midst.

Half stunned I stood up from the big crater, burning machine-gun belts spilled a coarse pinkish light. It lit the smoldering smoke of the explosion, where a pile of charred bodies were writhing, and the shadows of those still living were fleeing in all directions. Simultaneously, 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.”

Jünger started with 150 men in his company, and in an instant is left with 64. How does this cool, courageous man respond?

“Half an hour ago at the head of a full battle-strength company, I was now wandering around a labyrinth of trenches with a few, completely demoralized men. One baby-faced fellow, who was mocked a few days ago by his comrades, and on exercises had wept under the weight of the big munitions boxes, was now loyally carrying them on our heavy way, having picked them up unasked in the crater. Seeing that did for me. I threw myself to the ground, and sobbed hysterically, while my men stood grimly about.”

This is Jünger? Jünger the cold-blooded “serial killer,” who enjoyed sniping men? Jünger the sociopath, who “seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on”^[9]? Perhaps the words of his younger brother, relayed to him after the battle, will show what a man he was:

“Suddenly, bespattered with mud from his boots to his helmet, a young officer burst in. It was my brother Ernst, who at regimental HQ the day before had been feared dead. We greeted one another and smiled, a little stiffly, with the emotion. He looked about him and then looked at me with concern. His eyes filled with tears. We might both be members of the same regiment, true, but even then this reunion on the battlefield had something rare and wonderful about it, and the recollection of it has remained precious to me. After just a few minutes, he left me, and brought in the last five members of his company. I was laid on a tarpaulin, they stuck a sapling through the straps, and shouldered me off the battlefield.”

Well, he may view his comrades and relatives with care, but surely for the enemy–

“My Englishman lay in front of it, a mere lad. I had shot him right through the head. It is a strange feeling to look into the eyes of a man who you have killed with your own hands.”

Aha! That’s from the 1924 version, let’s see how the years have treated him in the 1961 version:

“Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look more closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.”

Oh. Oh. I remember reading, and thinking, “Where is the monster?” Jünger is oftentimes clinical, but never emotionless. He relays to us horrors visited upon civilians. “A shell falling in the garden of my lodgings killed a little girl who had been digging around for rubbish in a pit.” Shortly after, another, describing a shelled village: “On one doorstep lay a little girl, stretched out in a lake of crimson.” He tells us of mens’ deaths oftentimes with an undertone of fright: “Next to the entrance one man lay on his belly in a shredded uniform; his head was off, and the blood had flowed into a puddle. When an ambulanceman turned him over to check him for valuables, I saw as in a nightmare that his thumb was still hanging from the remains of his arm.” Sometimes it is more neutral: “With the sound of a plank crashing down, a bullet had drilled through his forehead. He crumpled into a corner of the trench, half upright, with his head pressed against the trench wall. His blood poured on to the floor of the trench, as if tipped out of a bucket. His snore-like death-rattle resounded in lengthening intervals, and finally stopped altogether.” Sometimes it is almost serene: “The man with the wound in the belly, a very young lad, lay in amongst us, stretched out like a cat in the warm rays of the setting sun. He slipped into death with an almost childlike smile on his face. It was a sight that didn’t oppress me, but left me with a fraternal feeling for the dying man.”

But he never delights in death for its own sake. He describes events as they happened, with a scientist’s clean observational talent, and catalogues death with an unsettling precision, but never with pleasure. He engages the enemy with conviction, but never hatred. He persistently calls out their courage and his respect for them. He tries to take prisoners and treats them well. It’s his memoirs so maybe some is presented in a better light, but after reading I think “Jünger the sociopath” is a misread. He talks about his hot-tempered bloodthirstiness during the assault as he gets carried away with the surging troops, but when he levels his pistol at the temple of a pleading British officer, the man pulls out a photograph with his family, and is let go.

But make no mistake: death is the theme of Storm of Steel. Pages upon pages of dead bodies, of endless artillery, of mutilation and wounds and hospitals and blood and guts and on and on and on… a blood-spattered man is carried away on the second page–thirteen fatalities from that hit–and the last death is Corporal Hengtsmann, who dies carrying Jünger to safety after his final wounding just a few short pages from the end. It is, above all, relentless.

What is a man to do? For Jünger, the war was an ordeal, but from this he could extract… well, nothing really, at least from the war qua war. Jünger does not think war is good; war is something that happens, like a hurricane that sweeps across the coast that most of us just have to survive. It can have moments of awe, of beauty, of power both physical and spiritual, but its soil is sown through with raw destruction. He and his comrades reap horror and death at every stroke, but on they go, they have to go on, and the challenge is to make something of yourself from the harvesting and not the fruits. How can anyone go on? I think, for Jünger, it was duty.

Our Storm Arrives

One Thursday evening, as I was finishing up a beer after building our baby-to-be’s dresser and leaving the crib for the next day, my pregnant wife called to me from the bathroom. All she said was my name, but it’s possible with tone alone to convey such a sense of urgency and fear that I was up in an instant, heart racing, from that single word. She was bleeding, which for pregnancy portends any number of grim possibilities.

We were off in a taxi to the hospital as fast as I could get one, hugging each other a little tearfully; we had done this before, a few months previously, and fortunately everything had been fine, just a bit of placenta coming loose maybe^[10]. So we rode together not as apprehensive as we had the first time, a little more sure of ourselves having been through one trial not so long ago. At a hospital “bleeding pregnant woman at 24 weeks” will really get everyone involved moving with alacrity, and we were right away seen by the physicians in their maternity ward. Everything looked fine in the ultrasound, they said; the two of them were chatty and joking with us.

But when they stopped talking with us, and started whispering together, the first inkling crept into my mind that something was really wrong. They seriously informed us that there was… something going on, what exactly they weren’t quite sure, and that their hospital wasn’t equipped to handle it. There were suddenly a lot of people around, getting my wife comfortable for a short ambulance ride to the better-equipped hospital nearby in the night. She was starting to go into labor by then. They nicely let me ride in the front of the ambulance, with thankfully no traffic that late.

They kept us overnight, trying to stop the labor which was partially successful. I remember timing it while the doctors were out, because some tiny corner of my mind remembered that was somehow important in a situation like this, but we hadn’t prepared for anything yet. We had only a few weeks before picked out a name.

Everything was stable overnight, but they made the decision for us in the morning to do the c-section on the Friday, while they were still fully staffed before the weekend. So I was suited up, watching a few wispy clouds drift outside a stark blue sky that matched my gown, pacing over a tiny stretch of hallway while they performed the epidural before they brought me in^[11].

I remember looking down and seeing literal pools of blood, like someone had dropped a bucket of red paint, and the sounds of suction like the dentist’s vacuum from hell as it slurped up everything my wife was spilling out as they ripped her open^[12]. She was strapped down completely, unable to move even if she had wanted to, as I sat by her sweating head and flipped the one wet paper towel they gave us on her forehead while we all told her what a great job she was doing over her panting breaths. Then a tiny little whimper as they took our baby out, before she was whisked away, and they could lower her mother down and start stitching her back together. The “uh oh” as her stitches popped open, and I looked over to see the surgeon stuffing her intestines back into her as the glistening gray mass writhed around his hands. And then it was done. My wife was recovering in a nearby room, and I was following our newborn daughter in a rolling incubator down to the NICU^[13]. She weighed 675 grams, a tiny thing that would fit in my cupped hands, dwarfed by her carriage^[14].

I was, as an interested but not knowledgeable father-to-be, possessed with a growing dread, as I knew that 24 weeks was early (normal gestation is 40 weeks), even if I didn’t know what “early” really meant; it was considered the cutoff for viability, but what does that really mean? It doesn’t take much research to figure out that it’s not a binary. Life isn’t pass/fail. The numbers vary widely depending on who was doing the study, where, on whom and when, but the bottom line was:

There was a 1 in 3 chance our baby would die in the hospital, and another 1 in 3 chance she would have moderate to severe disabilities^[15].

And I was afraid. I was afraid I would watch her die, that her little body would fail to develop, that her lungs or stomach would give out, that her brain would keep bleeding, that she would get an infection and not fight it off, the myriad possibilities taunted me as I sat in the hospital, processing. I researched the risk profiles, knew the causes, knew each hurdle she would face; she didn’t die the first day, but the first week, the first month…? A fetus’s lungs develop last, she wasn’t meant to breathe air for a few more months, and she was on mechanical ventilation and oxygen from the start; the underdeveloped alveoli could collapse, and she could drown in her own inflamed lungs’ fluid, or the stress could scar them so badly they couldn’t keep up as she grows and lead to bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Her brain was bleeding, a common issue in preterm babies, and we had to just hope that it would stop on its own; she was so young that her brain was literally smooth in the scans, as the wrinkles wouldn’t develop for a few more weeks. The warm, moist environment of the incubator made her especially susceptible to fungal infections, I remember asking about that (they always used antifungal creams they said). The worst was NEC, necrotizing enterocolitis, and you should flinch at anything mixing necro- and children as it is so much worse than it sounds; with NEC, their bowels start to die, with the predictable cascade of problems that follow. Oh, she had jaundice as well, so much of the first week we saw her under lurid blue lights, a little wiggling alien in her plastic spaceship.

I cried at home while my wife was in the hospital. We wondered if she would ever talk or walk, if she would ever go to school or if we would be taking care of her for the rest of our lives. I remember that first walk down to the NICU and talking with a doctor there, asking them if we should try to find a priest if it came down to that, and being told, “That is probably a good idea right now,” and making sure I knew how to perform an emergency baptism. Fear gripped me constantly, I lay awake at night reading papers about dead babies, I moved autonomously that first week while I rolled my wife in her wheelchair into the NICU to see our baby or finished building that crib at home, shambling about in a fugue state as I tried to take care of everyone everywhere all at once.

I was afraid, in a tiny, dark crevice of my mind, to give her her name that we had picked out with care only a few weeks before, dreading that it would be a waste if she died. But I knew she deserved it; not just her name, but my love. I crushed that little whispering doubt, and I knew that I had to just accept my fear. She could die, but to be a good father, I had to make myself vulnerable for her, I had to love her with my whole heart and be ready to accept her death if it came. It was what she deserved, it was what I owed her.

On Duty

It was my duty.

That’s what duty is, what we owe to others. Duty compelled me every step of the way, to hold her while the low-oxygen alarms did their pinging blare, to try to comprehend while the doctor showed us the images of her brain with colors streaked through for bleeds, to carefully consider the doctor’s request to give her corticosteroids and risk disability^[16]. One time, they were taking a blood sample, and I stuck my hands into the incubator to hold and comfort her as she wailed while they poked her foot to get enough blood, and they called me a “brave father.” Flattering, but unnecessary: how could I abandon my daughter?

Hours such as these were without doubt the most awful of the whole war.

You cower in a heap alone in a hole and feel yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become utterly meaningless and absurd. While you think it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing may have started on its course. Your discomfort is concentrated in your ear, that tries to distinguish amid the uproar the swirl of your own death rushing near.

It is dark, too; and you must find in yourself alone all the strength for holding out. You can’t get up and with a blasé laugh light a cigarette in the wondering sight of your companions. Nor can you be encouraged by the sight of your friend clipping a monocle into his eye to observe a hit on the traverse close beside you. You know that not even a cock will crow when you are hit.

Well, why don’t you jump up and rush into the night till you collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see you.

Yet someone watches you. Unknown perhaps to yourself, there is some one within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honour. You know that this is your place in the battle, and that a whole people relies on you to do your job. You feel, ‘If I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever after blush at every word of praise.’ You clench your teeth and stay.

Jünger writes this in Creighton’s 1924 version, and leaves it out in Hofmann’s 1961 version, but I don’t think he recants his conception of duty; he was stripping down the book to the core experience, as by this time he had been writing his thoughts for decades; he wrote in On Pain in 1934:

There is only one world-view that is worthy of us, and which has already been discussed as the Choice of Achilles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance.

The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time cannot be stopped; there is no possibility for prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.

We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end as destiny demands. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost post, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him.

That is greatness… The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

This was one year after Hitler had taken power; he would write On the Marble Cliffs in 1939 against fascism. In On Pain he mentions the Japanese developments of manned suicide torpedoes:

Recently, a story circulated in the newspapers about a new torpedo that the Japanese navy is apparently developing. This weapon has an astounding feature. It is no longer guided mechanically but by a human device—to be precise, by a human being at the helm, who is locked into a tiny compartment and regarded as a technical component of the torpedo as well as its actual intelligence.

He extrapolates this to the kamikaze strikes: “Manned planes can then be constructed as airborne missiles, which from great heights can dive down to strike with lethal accuracy the nerve centers of enemy resistance. The result is a breed of men that can be sent off to war as cannon fodder.” The bolding there is mine; he is giving a warning, not an endorsement!

Our conception of duty has been… complicated, to say the least, by modern history. “Just following orders” is perversion of duty; authoritarians evoked duty to ennoble sacrifice in service of the state, to enable cruelty and evil, to drive populations to extinction in a corrupted machine that uses nationalism to oil its gears. Jünger saw all of this, but I think he was like someone who had built the tool without being in control of its usage, watching as the Nazis stole it away, watching as hatred drove its strikes.

But love informed my duty to my baby daughter. While I held her against me as the alarms blared and a team of doctors sat there fiddling with knobs, while I weighed the possibilities with each week she survived, while I stared at my phone at night filled with dread that it would go off and I would hear a faceless doctor at the other end say, “Come quickly, something is wrong…” I waited anxiously for that hammer to fall, to deliver the killing blow and be done with us. Duty made me stand my figurative post, when I wanted to burrow myself away and drown in tears, when what was fair or right or just had been left behind, duty fixed me fast to my path.

Would that it had been me! I have faced moments of fear and my own mortality before, and they were trivial in the face of watching Death hover over my child while all I could do was hope. There was nothing in my power, no technique, no mysterious gnostic knowledge, no action on my end that would bring her through and out of that hospital. I could only hold her, comfort her and love her in the moment.

What Came After

Our daughter did live, in the end. We watched her grow, slowly and fitfully at first, until after the first month it seemed like the worst was over; another month in the NICU while she grew and learned to take a bottle, then a transfer to the less intensive infant clinic for another month and a half, until finally she was breathing on her own. It was still iffy when we would exactly take her out, as she had bouts of apnea, but after a weekend where we stayed with her 48 hours straight, I think the doctors finally thought that it would be fine. Still a few weeks before her due date, we took her home.

The very next day my wife came down with a nasty case of mastitis (for the second time!) and was in the hospital herself; I was alone with my daughter, wheeling her to the same hospital she had spent so much time in to spend time with mama. It still didn’t end; we wouldn’t know if she would ever crawl or walk or talk, all we could do was hold her and wait. I still could faintly hear the oxygen alarms if I closed my eyes.

I think it was after about a year that, finally, we started to feel the burden ease. She was starting to pull up on the couch and shuffle about, until one day she let go and took her first few steps into my arms^[17]. I cried then, too, but from happiness. Not until she was maybe two, and running and babbling and the pediatrician seemed so pleased, did we really feel that it was going to be alright. As parents we put so many of our hopes and dreams onto our children, but for me, what could I ask of her? She is enough, just being there; I never had to hold her while her lungs gave out, just watching her run and play is better than I had ever dreamed while holding her under those hospital lights. That summer we could have my father and stepmother there for her baptism then, not in a sterile room saying goodbye with a cup of water from the sink.

And we still deal with all the normal stress of parenting, the tantrums and fights to get dressed and the boredom of wanting to go to the park yet again when it’s raining, of not eating right, of wanting to watch a show on the tablet, of balancing work and daycare and everything. She may kiss me on the cheek and say, “Love you papa!” and stock up on feelings of love, but I know that no matter what it is my duty to care for her, even when she fights and screams at bedtime. Love is not a currency, to be banked and withdrawn when times are rough, lest you find you didn’t stock quite enough; it is a choice, an obligation I take on, a duty to her that calls even when I don’t quite feel it in the moment^[18].

My love and duty extend beyond my daughter; I cared for my wife when she was in the hospital, for recovering from the birth and twice with severe infections afterwards. When our cat started with blood in his vomit and diarrhea, it was our duty, out of love for him, to take him to the veterinary hospital, and care for him in the following months. Just when we felt that was finally under control, our other cat became ill, and we saved her at first with another visit to the hospital. Then I watched her waste away, as her body slowly killed itself by eating its own red blood cells, until she was so thin and weak. My dear little cat, who lay in my lap every night after our daughter had gone down, who was so nice and never swatted, who let our daughter pet her and cuddle her while our other never did, went through too much and it was my duty to take her for one final vet visit in the middle of the night, and hold her limp body for a long time afterwards while I wept ferociously. I feel (and I mean that presently) that I had failed to save her. I remember telling my wife that I thought it would be easier to lose a parent than to lose her, who had kept me company when everything seemed so bleak.

Less than a month later a tearful call from my sister had me on a flight within two hours, back home to my stepmother in the hospital who had suffered a heart attack, who I thought would be dead before I arrived but pulled through the night only to suffer a stroke. I held her hand as she died, hugged and comforted her sisters, and embraced my father as he cried that his wife of 30 years was gone; it was my duty, to them all, and to her that continued after her death when I gave a eulogy at her funeral.

For Jünger, who so loved his country, his duty called him to service; it was something he chose, and he placed his life at the Fatherland’s disposal, and watched it die, not himself. Storm of Steel is his account and reckoning with that. When duty fails, how does one keep going on? How do we place ourselves in service, to others but also to oneself? To face your fears and stand courageously, to accept pain and suffering unflinchingly, to fail and continue on, these are all themes of the book from a man who took his position in the hellish trenches of the Western Front for four years. I read it not long after our daughter came home, and in that miraculously true story I found echoes of my own experience. We don’t get to choose when the storm arrives or how, but we can choose how we face it.