Storm of Steel: We Fight Our Way Through Summary & Analysis

Briefly unconscious, Jünger wakes up to the sound of stretcher-bearers being summoned. An older man kindly stops to check Jünger’s wounds and fan him, as he’s sweating terribly. As the battle continues to storm around him, Jünger hopes the darkness will fall again. Before long, he hears a desperate message being passed along: “They’ve broken through!” This gives Jünger a renewed sense of life. Still bleeding, he sits up and surveys the battle. He sees British soldiers sweeping through the village with fixed bayonets, and German prisoners being marched along.

Jünger feebly encourages nearby soldiers to keep fighting, even as a ring of British soldiers closes in, calling for surrender. He acknowledges that now, “there was only the choice between captivity and a bullet.” He laboriously pulls himself out of the trench and staggers toward the village, dodging British fire. His blood loss makes him feel intoxicated. He finally joins a pocket of German resistance by an earthworks. A medic forces him to lie down, so he won’t bleed to death, and rolls him into a tarpaulin. Unable to crawl away from the continuous storm of bullets, Jünger waits “almost apathetically” to be shot again.

A corporal picks up Jünger, promising to try to get him through to the German lines, but the man is shot and killed before they’ve advanced very far. Jünger later visits this brave man’s parents to pay tribute to him. Finally, another volunteer successfully carries Jünger to a sheltered stretch of ground and ultimately to a dressing station, where a morphine injection finally brings relief. After that, the only remaining obstacle is the wild ambulance ride to the hospital. Once there, he’s soon comfortably under the nurses’ care, reading his copy of Tristram Shandy as he’d been doing before the attack began.

Jünger has been shot in the lung, so the recovery is arduous, but he receives encouraging visits and letters. He also spends many of the bedridden hours thinking over the war; once, he totals his wounds. He determines that, aside from ricochets and grazes, he's been hit at least 14 times—with bullets, shell splinters, shrapnel, grenade splinters, and bullet splinters. This adds up to a total of 20 scars. When Jünger receives a pair of gold wound-stripes, he feels fully justified in wearing them.

Two weeks later, Jünger is taken to Germany by train. In the hospital in Hanover, he joyfully reunites with Fritz. One day, while walking with his brother and other comrades, he feels the need to demonstrate his “war-worthiness” by leaping over a large armchair. It goes poorly—he’s soon back in bed with a dangerously high fever. But while being nursed back to health, he receives a telegram from General von Busse, informing him that the Kaiser has bestowed on him the order pour le Mérite.