STORM OF STEEL (Pbk) (Junger)

A new translation of one of the great novels of the First World War Ernst Junger arrived at the Western Front in December 1914 and fought for over four years in the First World War - during much of the time commanding platoons of shock troops in the bloody trench warfare of northern France and Flanders. He was wounded for the fourteenth and last time in August 1918. By this time he had received the Iron Cross First Class, the Knight's Cross, and finally the Pour le Merite, equivalent to the Victoria Cross. His battle journal "The Storm of Steel", first published in 1920, brought Junger immediate acclaim for its unflinching honesty and graphic narrative force. Stamped with truth, it remains among the half dozen most memorable books in the literature of the First World War It was originally written for regimental colleagues in 1920, made up from the diaries he kept during his campaigns against the French, British and, at one stage, the Indians on the Western Front. Junger rewrote it numerous times before his death, aged 103, in 1998. A stark contrast to Sassoon, Graves or Manning, Junger is proudly bellicose. He talks of "warriorhood", pure combat and noble death. He makes no effort to contrast the experience of the trenches against any domestic setting and the book is almost existential in its close focus: it is about nothing more than the twenty-five metres that surround him as he cheerfully prospers among the dangers and the squalors of trench life.