To me, the metamorphoses of Storm of Steel on its journey from fighting to writing principally go to show one thing: that this is an indestructible book, clear, trustworthy, close to events and full of matter. Already it has survived its author, whose best-known work it will, I suspect, remain. It has also, I have to say, survived Basil Creighton’s translation. In theory, it is always an advantage for a translator to be close to his original in time, and I imagine – though I don’t know – that Creighton would also have fought – but his knowledge of German was patchy, his understanding of Junger negligible, and his book seems much older and staler than his original. There are literally hundreds of coarsenesses, mistakes and nonsenses in his translation; open it at just about any page and you start to find them. These range from trivial mistakes over prepositions like, ‘This typical forward movement made me sure that we were in for it till nightfall’ (my italics), whereas what Junger means, evidently, is ‘that we were in for some action before nightfall’ (p. 277); to errors of sense, like the ‘unobtrusive’ blowing up of church towers, to rob the enemy artillery of landmarks, where what is meant rather is their ‘unceremonious’ blowing up (p. 13 3), in such a way that it almost occasions casualties, or his ‘airplanes tied with streamers’, which should have been ‘rosette-decorated aircraft’ (i.e., Royal Air Force planes) (p. 170); the loss of tone, as in a description of a type of shell being ‘different and far worse’, when Junger’s typical bravado demands ‘altogether more exciting[ly]’ (p. 45), or Christmas being spent ‘in this miserable fashion’ (for ‘recht ungemut-lich’), instead of the cooler and less plaintive ‘less than merry Christmas’ (p. 59); to a failure to recognize German figurative speech, so that he has ‘Unfortunately, the enemy was so plentifully supplied with munitions that at first it took our breath away,’ and not ‘Unfortunately, our opponents tended to have more munitions than ourselves, and so could play the game for longer’ (the German phrase is ‘einen langen Atem haben’, literally, ‘to have a long breath’, and hence stamina) (p. 66), or ‘We were soon beyond the zone of the light field guns and slackened our pace, as only a bird of ill-omen need expect to be hit by an isolated heavy,’ which is incomprehensible, unless you know what it means: ‘Before long, we were out of range of the light artillery, and could slow down, as the isolated heavy shells would only strike you if your number was up’ (p. 253), which revolves around the German ‘Pechvogel’, or ‘unlucky person or thing’. At the most entertaining extreme, it is the sort of ‘howler’ beloved of Classics masters, as in this sentence: ‘The pleasure of my return was dashed by an unexpected alarm which had for me the peculiarly unpleasant consequence that I had to ride the company charger to Beaumont.’ Was it really that bad? Creighton is only one letter out, but unfortunately, as it often does, it makes quite a difference: the German is ‘Gefechtstross’, not ‘Gefechtsross’.
What Junger actually had to do was ‘accompany the baggage train to Beaumont’ (p. 131). An instance of a silent howler, a kind of literary whimper – mistranslation shows more commonly as fatuity than disgrace – is the following passage in Creighton: ‘Streamers of black and white and red crossed the cloudless blue of the evening sky. The beams of the sunset dipped them in a tender rosy red so that they resembled a flight of flamingoes. We unfolded our trench-maps and spread them out to see how far we had penetrated the enemy lines.’ This is not a children’s party, or an – even for Junger – unusually tender pastoral moment, rather it once again involves the air force:
The cloudless evening sky was crossed by a squadron of planes marked with our black, red and white. The last rays of the sun, which had already gone down, daubed them a shade of delicate pink, so they looked like flamingoes. We opened out our maps, and turned them face down, indicating to those above how far we had already pushed into the enemy line. (p. 249)
Creighton’s translation has had a good long innings, but I fancy it’s time it was retired. If I might be allowed a couple of almost theoretical observations on what is a joyfully accessible and straight-ahead kind of book, I would like first to put the idea of a star shape in the reader’s mind. The characteristic focus and form, it seems to me, of Storm of Steel is just such an in-and-out, the points and capes, the nooks and spines. It is not actually the most tightly drawn book one can imagine: that would have made it a small circle. Junger is able, for instance, to accommodate the record of his brother Friedrich’s ordeal at St-Pierre-Vaast; he generalizes beyond his own particular experience; he offers thoughts on the conduct of war, and of future wars; he does take us out o France and Flanders at moments; and, while the most characteristic depth of focus of the book is maybe ten yards or so – the interiors, the trenches and dugouts, the cars and lorries, the ruined houses, the beautiful, cultivated catalogues of war junk (like the one on p. 94) – still, there are also equally memorable distance shots, repeatedly of the sky, and of the colours and sounds of various ordnance, moments of eerie contemplation, like the background of a Renaissance portrait, and with just that in-and-out effect:
On the isolated heights on the way to Ransart was the ruin of a one-time estaminet – dubbed ‘Bellevue’ on account of the wide view of the front that was afforded from it – and that was a place I came to love, in spite of its exposed situation. From there, the view stretched over the dead land, whose defunct villages were linked by roads that had no traffic on them, and on which no living creature was to be seen. In the distance glimmered the outline of the abandoned city of Arras, and round to the right the shining chalk mine-craters of St Eloi. The weedy fields lay barren under the passing clouds and the shadows of clouds, and the tightly woven web of trenches spread its little white and yellow links, secured by lengthy communication trenches. From time to time, there was a puff of smoke from a shell, lobbed into the air as if by a ghostly hand; or the ball of a shrapnel hung over the wasteland like a great white flake slowly melting. The aspect of the landscape was dark and fantastic, the war had erased anything attractive or appealing from the scene, and etched its own brazen features, to appal the lonely onlooker, (pp. 38-9).
In terms of feeling, there is a similar story, describable in terms of ‘hot’ and ‘cold’: moments of resolute sang-froid and others of near-panic; being alone or with companions; being bored or in great danger or great exhilaration, that ‘wild, unsuspected hilarity’ he sees and feels in his first engagement (p. 24); anonymity and dandyishness, hebetude and exquisite sensitivity; nature and warfare; living in cosy near-domesticity and like animals in a hole in the ground. The same with the style, sometimes kept to the technicalities of a military situation report, and sometimes in the almost provocatively cultivated, French Symbolist notes on sound, colour, synaesthesia even, as in this notorious instance: ‘Frequently, yellow rockets were shot off that blew up in the air, and sent a rain of fire cascading down, of a colour that somehow reminded me of the tone of a viola’ (p. 114). Throughout, the book seems to me to have a hard, inorganic edge, which is why I have the impression of a star, rather than, say, an amoeba. The scenes, for example, with Jeanne, the girl living by herself in her cottage, seem ruthlessly trimmed back; or the references to friends and fellow officers of Junger, or to home and family, which are never allowed to get blobby and out of hand. As I’ve shown already, the accounts of trench-fighting or assaults are similarly more disciplined and restrained than they once were. Even the composition of the book, veering between the minimalism of probably authentic diary entries in the chapter on ‘Daily Life in the Trenches’, and highly polished, written-up pieces of description that evolved much later, follows the jaggedness of the star shape. This, it seems to me, is one of Junger’s great freedoms and innovations.