[Quintus Curtius]

(06-22-2014 09:31 AM)Icarus Wrote:  

From the opening pages of Ernst Jünger's brutal and fascinating Storm of Steel, a book based on Jünger's 4 years of experience on trench warfare on the Western Front in WWI:

Quote:

The train stopped at Bazancourt, a small town in Champagne, and we got out. Full of awe and incredulity, we listened to the slow grinding pulse of the front, a rhythm we were to become mightily familiar with over the years. The white ball of a shrapnel shell melted far off, suffusing the grey December sky. The breath of battle blew across to us, and we shuddered. Did we sense that almost all of us - some sooner, some later - were to be consumed by it, on days when the dark grumbling yonder would crash over our heads like an incessant thunder?

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of
the extraordinary. 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. We thought of it as manly, as action, a merry duelling party on flowered, blood-bedewed meadows. 'No finer death in all the world than ...' Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home!

I just bought this book today. Can't wait till it arrives. Just reading some snippets from it made want to wipe the sweat from my brow.

It is the most militant, unabashedly aggressive, fantastic war memoir I have seen yet. And I've only seen excerpts from it.

But from what I've read so far, I feel like picking up a Mauser rifle, donning a Stalhelm and leaping into the trenches to help Junger fight off the French poilus and British Tommies.


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