Storm of Steel: Regniéville Summary & Analysis

The company gets a brief respite in the town of Doncourt. Here Jünger gets a lesson about theft: he and a friend, Tebbe, steal a glass coach from a Flemish mansion and go joyriding. Unfortunately, the coach has no brakes, and Jünger just manages to escape the resulting crash unhurt. A few days later, they march to the village of Regniéville to occupy a position on the line once more. Here they are fighting the French, not the British. Jünger is pleased to discover that the trenches are constructed from marl, a sturdier type of mud, and he also collects many interesting fossils. However, the lice and rats are a menace, and the food is unsavory. 

During trench duty, Jünger befriends an older officer named Kloppmann, whose courage he admires. They make a couple of unsuccessful raids on the French trenches. Later, regimental headquarters asks Jünger to lead another such raid and take some French prisoners. He leads one group and is in overall command of a total of three. Given that it’s late in 1917, he is surprised how many men eagerly volunteer for the mission. He takes a total of 14, including Kloppman. They spend 10 days practicing for the raid.

At 5:05 the next morning, feeling aware of the seriousness of the undertaking, Jünger leads his men into enemy territory. They encounter no resistance when they enter the trench. As they move through the seemingly empty trench, Jünger notices a mess-tin with an upright spoon standing in it and files this image in his memory. Dodging a few tossed grenades, they find themselves increasingly disoriented, until they eventually stumble upon the mess-tin again and figure out their location. By the time they extricate themselves from the trench, they’ve escaped with only four German lives, a French machine gun, and no French prisoners.

After the adventure in the trench, Colonel von Oppen comforts Jünger despite the lack of success. Later, he’s given a ride to the divisional command, where the staff officer crankily blames Jünger for the mission’s failure. Jünger realizes that at divisional command, the outlook on war is far more detached. To the staff officer, the mission was just a plan on paper, not “an intensely experienced reality.”

The next day, Jünger and the other surviving members of the patrol are awarded Iron Crosses and two weeks’ furlough. Later, he learns that some of the other men were taken prisoner and survived. Kloppmann, though, was among those who had been killed. Jünger looks back on the whole event as one of the most “eerie” moments of his war.