Newly Published Memoir Recalls Horror of Western Front

[Blue_Tires]

Source: der spiegel

One of the most graphic accounts of World War I, the diary of German author Ernst Jünger, has been published for the first time. Its dispassionate description of life and death on the Western Front is a cold indictment of war -- even though Jünger embraced the conflict throughout as a glorious test of manhood.

August 26, 1916, Guillemont, Somme region, northeastern France:

"In front of my hole lies an Englishman who fell there yesterday. He is fat and bloated and has his full pack on and is covered in thousands of steel blue flies."


July 1, 1916, Monchy, near Arras:

"In the morning I went to the village church where the dead were kept. Today there were 39 simple wooden boxes and large pools of blood had seeped from almost every one of them, it was a horrifying sight in the emptied church."

March 22, 1918, Vraucourt

"... there was a bang and he fell covered in blood with a shot to the head. He collapsed into his corner of the trench and remained there with his head against the wall of the trench, in a crouching position. His snoring death rattle came at lengthening intervals until it stopped altogether. During the final twitches he passed water. I crouched next to him and registered these events impassively."

Shortly ahead of the 92nd anniversary of the Nov. 11, 1918 armistice that ended World War I, one of the most graphic and comprehensive descriptions of the conflict has been published for the first time -- the war diaries of the author Ernst Jünger, a lieutenant in the German infantry who fought from shortly after the outbreak in August 1914 until August 1918, three months before its end, when he was shot through the lung. It was his seventh wound. Jünger only died in 1998, at the age of 102.

The diary written in 15 notebooks -- Jünger wrote later that he couldn't remember if the stains on them were blood or red wine -- were the basis for his book "In Stahlgewittern," or "Storm of Steel," a deeply controversial reminiscence first published in 1920 that glorified the war as purifying test of individual and national strength. He became an icon for conservative nationalists after the war and the Nazis celebrated him as a hero. But he kept them at a distance and declined to join the party.



Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,726672,00.html

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Blue_Tires.

[raccoon]

2. thanks for posting that. nt

[Poll_Blind]

3. May there be an end to such terrible things on our Earth. n/t

PB

[Wednesdays]

4. Wounded seven times, and yet lived to be 102.

What a tough old geezer. Unfortunate, though, that after all he'd been through, he never learned what a horrible thing war was, and helped along the next one.

[Blue_Tires]

5. Friday kick