Storm of Steel

Merry Christmas!  I’ve already covered the Christmas Truce of 1914 in a prior blog, but I still believe World War I is an inexhaustible source of holiday blog material.  The ironic juxtaposition of trenches, poison gas, and pointless slaughter really fits in with Christmas.  Or Festivus.  Anyhow.

A few weeks back we met our old Paris buddy Jean in Virginia, and while browsing through Barnes & Noble with him I picked up this book by Ernst Junger.  It’s his memoirs of World War I in the Imperial German Army.  

Junger was actually in the French Foreign Legion immediately before the war and returned to Germany to fight.  He started out as a private and won a commission through Germany’s equivalent of Officer Candidate School.  He served  throughout the war, though wounded several times.   Immediately after the war he wrote this.   Oddly, he never joined the Nazi Party, though he and Hitler exchanged autographed copies of their books.  During WWII he served as a captain in the Wehrmacht in Paris, France, in a non-combatant role.   He lived all the way to 1998.

I recall an Internet article on WWI a few years ago, which served to dispel the notion that troops were in combat continuously throughout the war, and this is reflected in Junger’s story.  In fact, the troops were rotated from behind the lines, second line, and front line, and even front line service could be fairly quiet if there was no battle actually going on at the time.  The battles themselves were terrifying, and Junger was amazed to survive brutal bombardments and fairly accurate enemy fire.  Grenades were popular because they could be thrown around corners in traverses.  Gas warfare figures heavily in his story, and is yet another peculiar horror of this war, and mostly absent thereafter.  The nature of mobile warfare – tanks and motorized infantry, e.g. WWII – make slow-moving clouds of poison gas impractical once the trenches are left behind.

The majority of his opponents were British, and all of his service was on the Western Front.  He had a high opinion of their morale and skill.  On rare occasions Junger faced off against the French, and they were also deadly foes.   His quotes of French were correct (!).  Despite serving through November 1918, he makes no mention whatsoever of Americans, and only brief mentions of tanks, after battles with no direct experience in combat against them.  Although the cover illustration shows Germany’s A7V and a British Mark IV, he makes no specific reference to either and a brief reference to smaller, faster tanks, presumably the French Renault FT.   The book ends abruptly with the end of the war and he offers no opinion on the outcome.

The obvious comparison is with “All Quiet on the Western Front”.   That story, though, is fiction, whereas Junger’s account is first person non-fiction.  Remarque’s story is apolitical; the German soldiers show no particular love or loyalty to the Kaiser or even Germany, nor any hostility to him or to the opposing sides.  The general idea is that the war is a huge slaughter and an equally huge mistake on the part of everyone concerned – i.e. pretty much anti-war.  Both film adaptations were American, with US actors.  Storm of Steel has yet to come to the big screen, and after having read it from cover to cover, I suppose I can ascertain why.  

Junger makes only passing references to the Kaiser.  He won the Pour Le Merite, the “Blue Max”, Imperial Germany’s highest award.  Nowhere in the book does he express the opinion that the war is wrong or a mistake, or that Germany bears responsibility for it; the closest is a later, vague acknowledgement that things could be going better for his side.   There is really zero politics here and certainly NO anti-war sentiment.  Hell, Junger even makes jokes.  He respects the British and French as worthy opponents (no mention of Americans, Russians, Italians, Austrians, Turks, etc.).   For him, war was glorious, fun, and exciting.  This alone seems to turn off many readers, especially since he’s happy to describe the appalling casualties he witnesses, even on his own side, which he obviously saw more of.  This lack of passion or remorse hits many people the wrong way – how could you go through WWI and NOT become a pacifist?  Well, that was his take on the whole thing, and people are free to disagree with him.  Apparently his non-combat role in WWII was simply because of his age, not his inclination. 

Movie directors and producers being fairly liberal and anti-war, no one short of Mel Gibson could be expected to turn this book into a movie, though even so I’m puzzled even the Nazis didn’t tackle it.  Be that as it may, it serves as a good compliment to “All Quiet on the Western Front” and well worth reading in its own right.

Joyeux Noel

The true story of the “Christmas truce” of 1914 in WWI. On Christmas Eve, somewhere on the trench lines where a Scottish unit was stationed next to a French unit, peace broke out between the two sides. A German opera singer and his fiance (also an opera singer) sang for both sides; the troops came out and shared stories, alcoholic beverages, and pictures; and on Christmas Day they buried their dead and played some football. They could walk around No Man’s Land without worrying about shooting each other. Needless to say, the top brass considered all this “treason” and forbid this from ever happening again. Sure enough, it was GOOD for morale and BAD for the war. How can you shoot at men you’ve talked to in person just hours before? How can you go on when you can see how stupid the war is? When you see you have more in common with the poor soldiers on the other side than with the idiots running the war on your own? And imagine if this “truce” had occurred all the way up and down the trench line, from Switzerland to the English Channel. The war would have been over immediately; they would have faced a wholesale mutiny on all sides, German, French and British. It doesn’t take too much to imagine the soldiers telling the officers, “fuck you, if you and the top brass want a war, you can fight it yourselves!”

Clearly, soldiers who took enemy trenches could see that their foes lived in as much misery and filth as they did. Watching your own soldiers get wiped out by “friendly fire” drove home how much damage they were doing to each other. For the life of them, the soldiers could not grasp what the war was all about. Even had they been astute enough to have some idea of the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, that still wouldn’t explain why Germans, French and British were slaughtering each other in France. Why not just let the Austrians and Serbs murder each other – assuming the Archduke’s life was worth even that?

In “All Quiet on the Western Front”, the German soldiers casually speculate on the reason for the war. Although (with a few exceptions) they’re fairly bright soldiers, they still come up with blanks. Even the dull soldier has the common sense to realize, “I’ve never even MET an Englishman until I fought them in the trenches, and I dare say many of them would say the same about us.” Time and time again the soldiers realize, “I have no particular beef, gripe, complaint, or grudge against the opposing side, either as an aggregate country or against enemy soldiers in particular.” How can they? They’ve never even met each other.

WWII was a bit different. There, suddenly, they had ideology to motivate them – ideological motivations which were mostly absent during WWI. The Germans were motivated by regular nationalism (most Wehrmacht personnel), National Socialism (Waffen SS), and anti-bolshevism (all of them); add to this the remarkable multi-national nature of the Waffen SS, somehow able to recruit French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, etc. (former enemies!) to fight against the Russians – hell, they got RUSSIANS to fight the Russians. Again, testimony to how brutal and unpopular Stalin and the Soviet government was that there was no shortage of not only Ukrainians and other ethnic groups, but even Russians, willing to fight for the Nazis against the Red Army. For their part, the Russians were motivated by their own nationalism (for most soldiers of the Red Army) and communism (for the minority). The Allies were motivated by abstract notions of freedom and liberty; and the moral indignation became even fiercer once US troops began liberating concentration camps and discovering what the Germans were really up to all this time. The Japanese sincerely believed in their own country’s destiny to rule Asia and defeat the caucasian US/European powers. Of course, WWII was also a dynamic war, with no stalemates on any front. Men died, but in the course of attacking and defending, not this business of thousands dead for a few inches of strategically inconsequential mud. The front moved too fast for soldiers to worry too much about how their enemies were dealing with it.

And in Iraq today there is no connection between the US troops and the insurgents they fight against. The insurgents don’t see us as normal human beings trying to make Iraq a better place, we’re just occupiers. And our troops aren’t inclined to view the insurgents as normal human beings trying to liberate their own country, they’re just a bunch of sick fucks (which they are). The cultural and religious differences are too much between the sides to permit the kind of fraternization which occurred in No Man’s Land on Christmas Day in 1914, to occur in Iraq today.

Consider this, too: in the US, we have Protestants, Catholics, Jews, etc. all living together peacefully without killing each other (Northern Ireland is a different story). Yet in Iraq there is civil war beween Sunnis and Shi’ites – sects of the SAME RELIGION! If Sunnis and Shi’ites can’t get along with each other, how can Muslims possibly relate to, much less peacefully coexist with, other religions? More directly, how can the Muslim insurgents ever relate to the US soldiers? We’re talking about fanatics by their nature. But at least us Americans and Europeans can enjoy our own peace and Christmas.