Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Storm of Steel, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Manliness and Duty
Modern Warfare
Suffering and Death
Foreigners, Enemies, and Empathy
The Complex Reality of War
Summary
Analysis
The next day, following an artillery barrage (what Jünger comes to know as “drumfire”), the company is finally ordered forward. Further up the line, people are hit—Jünger sees bits of bloody cloth and flesh where the casualties were carried away. Shells and tree branches begin to crash down; a dead horse blocks the path. Amid all this blood and gore, “there [is] a wild, unsuspected hilarity.”
Jünger gets his first taste of battle, and he portrays the vivid sensory details of modern warfare that assault him long before he reaches the front lines. The suffering caused by war doesn’t only impact human beings, but the natural world as well. Exposure to such extremes also causes emotional reactions which are hard to explain or categorize.
Themes
The column continues marching loosely over no-man’s-land, past dead and dying figures, and Jünger reflects that the experience is less frightening than he’d expected. They are held down by artillery fire for a while, then advance across French territory toward the village of Les Eparges. On the way, they pass dozens of frozen, unburied French corpses.
No-man’s-land refers to the disputed, unoccupied land in between the German and French positions. Here, that territory is littered with the remains of fallen soldiers whom there’s been no opportunity to bury. Yet, even as he sees the bodies of comrades, Jünger feels emotionally detached from the violent reality of battle.
Themes
The next day, Jünger examines the unfamiliar contents of the captured French trench and waits with his comrades while German and French bullets and shells fly overhead. Sitting with Kohl, a veteran of Perthes, Jünger is soon assured that this is his first “proper” battle. Later, as the group is moving toward a different position, they are pursued through a stand of beech trees by terrifying explosions. Suddenly, Jünger is wounded in the thigh by a piece of shrapnel. Taking shelter in the trench he’d just left, he discovers many other wounded men, some of them far worse off than himself. Horrified by their suffering, he flees back into the undergrowth outside, even as shells continue to fall.
Jünger and his comrades have succeeded in capturing some French territory, and he finds satisfaction in finally being directly a part of the action. When Jünger is wounded for the first time, he experiences the immediacy of suffering. Yet it’s others’ more dire suffering that frightens him more than his own, showing the complex psychological pressures of the battlefield.
Themes
Eventually, stretcher-bearers find Jünger and carry him back to the dressing-station. The next day, a wagon bears him through heavy fire to the main medical station, and he’s ultimately loaded onto a hospital train bound for Heidelberg. Seeing his hometown in the springtime, Jünger “ha[s] good and serious thoughts, and for the first time sense[s] that this war [i]s more than just a great adventure.”
For the wounded, even the process of rescue was typically harrowing, since medics risked their lives to transport and treat victims under fire. Jünger’s experience of being wounded helps him recognize the gravity of warfare more fully, in contrast to his romantic view and youthful attitude months earlier.
Themes
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At Les Eparges, Jünger has survived his first battle, and it was very different from what he had expected. During the entire engagement, he never set eyes on an opponent. Only much later will he experience the clash of opponents on the open battlefield.
Jünger’s experience illuminates the complexity of modern warfare. When opponents huddle in trenches, there is very little face-to-face engagement, which lends a more detached and passive mindset toward combat. This will only become truer as warfare relies increasingly on tanks and planes instead of men with rifles and bombs.
Themes
