My Last Assault

At the end of July of 1918, Jünger is sent to “rest quarters” in a suburb called Escaudoeuvres in the Artois region. He occupies the “best bedroom” of a Northern French working-class family’s home. Though this is supposed to be a period of repose for Jünger, British aircraft are constantly overhead, and Jünger is incessantly reminded of the superior weaponry the enemy now holds. It is also a time when drilling exercises and general training are still being carried on. For the first time, Jünger reports on this with a distinct sense of weariness.

Yet he is able to spend his free time almost as if on vacation, reading, swimming, practicing shooting, and riding. Propaganda leaflets are being dropped in the region. Almost as if drawn by nostalgia, Jünger gets on a bicycle and rides to Cambrai, which he seems surprised to find in a “dire state.”

On the twenty-third of August, Jünger is given orders to report to Marquion. He leads three platoons through the region around Cambrai, which had already been fought over so devastatingly the previous year. The destination of the men’s march is a place called Favreuil. Jünger meets up with officers with whom he has served throughout the war—Kius, Boje, Junker, Schaper, Schrader, Heins, Findeisen, and others. He has a sense that it will prove to be the last coming-together of this group of comrades.

As he tells his men to advance, Jünger recalls how many times over the four years they have, just as now, marched forward into the setting sun, which now bears a metaphorical significance. Jünger is later told that some of the men were sure he would not come out of this last engagement alive. His platoon comes under fire as they advance downhill. Jünger is hit in the chest and “feels the bullet taking away my life.” In the moment of being hit, he states that at last he feels some sense of purpose as well as a kind of happiness he has not felt before. He is surprised by his reaction: he believes that he is nearing death, but his feeling has “something untroubled and merry about it.” At that moment he imagines he is going to a realm where there is to be “neither war nor enmity.”

We Fight Our Way Through

After Jünger has fallen on the battlefield, a man from another company, an “older man,” comes to him and examines his wounds, which are in the right side of the chest and the back. Though the British are swarming all over the field, a series of comrades are able to carry Jünger to places of safety. One of them, a Corp. Hengstmann, is shot down while doing so, and collapses gently under Jünger. A Sgt. Strichalsky of the Medical Corps is then able to carry Jünger to a dressing-station, where the physician in charge, Dr. Key, is a friend of Jünger’s. He is given a shot of morphine, tended to by the nurses, and soon is able to resume reading the novel Tristram Shandy, which he had started and been forced to put down at the outbreak of the engagement.

Jünger has been wounded for the last time, and his recovery now, as he briefly describes it, is an idyllic period. He observes that when lying on one’s back for long periods, it is necessary to distract oneself, and he counts up the various wounds he has received in the course of the war. He determines that he has been hit, apart from minor grazings, fourteen times: five times by bullets, twice...