"For I cannot too often repeat, a battle was no longer an episode that spent itself in blood and fire; it was a condition of things that dug itself in remorselessly week after week and even month after month.... Chivalry here took a final farewell. It had to yield to the heightened intensity of war, just as all fine and personal feeling has to yield when machinery gets the upper hand. The Europe of today appeared here for the first time on the field of battle. (It) seemed that man on this landscape he had himself created, became different, more mysterious and hardy and callous than in any previous battle.... After this battle the German soldier wore the steel helmet, and in his features there were chiselled the lines of an energy stretched to the utmost pitch, lines that future generations will perhaps find as fascinating and imposing as those of many heads of classical or Renaissance times."

Citation taken from: Ernst Jünger- Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-troop Officer on the Western Front (New York, Howard Fertig, 1933) Photo: Jünger as a recruit at the Hannover barracks of the 73rd Füsilier Regiment. Picture taken from: Heimo Schwilk (ed.), Ernst Jünger : Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten, (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), p. 46.

Photo: Ernst Jünger in 1937. Picture taken from: Armin Mohler (ed.), Die Schleife, (ZŸrich: Die Arche, 1955), plate from pp. 80-81