It's a fact, when talking on the subject of war, we presume that if the generals and country leaders didn't start them, they would by no means occur. In a book like Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, though, there seems to be one more requirement, ready and enthusiastic soldiers. Junger would have probably preferred themselves "warriors" or barbarians. It's within this book that Ernst Junger tells the story of a man who describes and most likely believed that the battlefront of World War I was not a awful place to be, in fact that it was a quite magnificent place to be. Without a doubt, the reader can tell that Junger feels it was an honor to able to participate in Kaiser Wilhelm's war for the good of the Fatherland. Ernst Junger was simply
Every hero is, at one point or another confronted by death, and it's a shame that for those fighters in WWI experienced that at such an early age. He states in the book once you've a witness to such a thing you begin to realize that the fighting and the war itself is not the horrible thing about it all. "It is not danger, however extreme it may be, that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions."(60) It's even been agreed upon by scholars that the situation on the Western Front during the war, where the modern warfare was born, submitted the fighters/ soldiers to the worst conditions imaginable. World War I wasn't your old typical war of two huge armies gathering together and meeting at a specific spot for battle, but rather involved trenches and weapons of mass destruction. The actual fighting, where the barrage of bullets never stopped and the typical soldier lived in the trench and small holes, where diseases could've been spawning, and where they battled alongside dead and rotting bodies, with barely any food and only your fellow soldiers there to stick it out with you. "We spent Christmas Eve in the line. The men stood in the mud and sang Christian carols that were drowned by the enemy machine-guns."(53) He obviously grew tired and exhausted of it all, but it was at a point where you can't live without the war but you certainly couldn't live with it. It shouldn't be unknown why