Storm of Steel

“Daily Life in the Trenches” is made up of excerpts from Jünger’s diary. He tells the reader he has come to feel at home in the trenches, taking tea in the evening in his dugout, sitting by the woodstove “with a feeling of cosy seclusion” (52). He has learned to tune out the bombs and the tread of boots outside, and he has come to know every nook and cranny of his section. What follows, he says, is a “conscientious analysis” (52) of his days in the trenches, stretching from October to April.

Most of his diary entries have to do with either the morbid or the mundane:“7 October 1915. Standing at dawn on the fire-step opposite our dugout next to the sentry when a bullet ripped through his forage cap without harming a hair on his head” (52). He continues to describe grisly experiences with an emotional detachment: “24 November. A machine-gunner was gravely wounded in the head in our sector. Half an hour later, another man in our company had his cheek laid open by infantry fire” (55).

He writes of the muddy conditions of the trenches, how with the rain they turn into a quagmire. Other entries tell of events like hunting rats or pheasants, as well as how dangerous it is to even use the latrine. Others tell how often they drink in the villages, one man getting so drunk he fired at his own lines. Jünger himself gets lost and almost shot after stumbling drunk in the dark. Still others tell of villages bombed, men lost on the road, at the latrine, in their own dugouts. He writes how any shot at the enemy results in retaliation, and how after one such incident he talks with the enemy commander, claiming a recent shot at one of Jünger’s men was “treacherous” (57). After a cordial conversation, both men say goodnight and immediately fire at one another.

Jünger ends the chapter by saying that much of the activity in the field in those days has “its funny—blood funny—side” (66), such as the time a soldier who stammered is shot at because he can’t say the password in time.