REVIEW: Copse 125 – Ernst Jünger (1925; Rogue Scholar Press, 2020)
This little wood, or bit of copse, has no importance, and its name, if it had one, would never be heard of; the holding or losing it is a mere grain of sand in the balance of the war—but all the same I wish I may have one day the power and opportunity to say what was done at such spots and what the men were who stood their ground there. For no words and no thanks can be enough.1
Rossignol Wood can be seen today a little over five minutes outside of the towns of Hebuterne and Gommecourt, in northwestern France. Named such by the French, and Nightingale Wood by the English, it dots a landscape otherwise dominated by farmland and fields as an idyllic respite from a certain blazing summer sun. There is no particular significance to this wood, except that it has been immortalized now as the titular patch of ground upon which Ernst Jünger’s Copse 125 takes place: a tiny, insignificant, strategically meaningless collection of trees, roots, and dirt that rose ever so slightly above what was then a hellish landscape of craters, ruined trench work, and death.
Artifacts of the war can be found today still buried amid the indentations of the shell holes and trenches in the wood. Old cans, spent munitions, shrapnel, and mysterious chunks of iron and steel form a metallurgical mine of valueless antiques in the copse, standing in as tangible shadows of an incomprehensible environment that has since passed out of living memory. That reminder sits on the south side of the wood in the form of two small cemeteries under which rest the bodies of those who fell in the area; two of the many countless roadside graveyards that riddle the Somme battlefield. The cemetery that bears the wood’s name carries the interesting distinction of including the final resting places of some thirty Germans who fell defending the position during the 1918 period which Jünger’s book details.
It is tempting, considering the time at which Copse 125 was written and the period which it covers, to compare it to The Storm of Steel, but the two books are radically different in all major respects. Where The Storm of Steel is a chaotic endeavor, both in content and in construction, Copse 125 is a linear expression of musings, philosophy, and tactics, interspersed with anecdotes of people and places, and framed by the entries of a diary. The Storm of Steel captures four years of the war and barely rests with enough time for ruminations or reflections; it’s short for its content, concise, and in certain respects, jagged and sharp as it works to assemble the events of the cataclysm.
Copse 125, on the other hand, is almost entirely comprised of Jünger’s interior musings. Much of The Storm of Steel passes without Jünger offering commentary on the events he’s describing, which greatly services the narrative and better distills the experience of the War into the profound mystery that he understood it to be. This volume, however, offers a very different approach to wartime experience, and without undermining or contradicting his previous work; Jünger gives his own thoughts far more attention and develops ideas ranging from nationalism to technology into proper concepts. The key distinction between the two works could be summarized as such: Copse 125 is a book in which Jünger expresses himself, rather than the war that he had survived. If Storm affects the reader the way a narrowly-missed shell blows up right in front of him, Copse reads more like the stunned and deafened silence that immediately follows the explosion.
The Copse & Daily Life
Jünger describes the copse as a strategically unimportant entanglement of forestry and earthworks, and one whose relative exposure attracted the enemy guns even when it was left largely empty of troops. He explains:
this isolated patch of wood rises sharply from a bare plain and so draws the fire from all sides. For this reason it would be advisable, perhaps, to leave it unoccupied, and upon the threat of an attack to add such a weight of shell-fire to the enemy’s that no living being could exist in it; or else after blowing up its defences to isolate it in a pall of deadly and heavy gas. For such places are man-traps and their continuous occupation is very costly.2
This defensive position taken up by German forces in 1918 consisted of trenches cut deep into the wooded rise, continuous with the trenches that ran eastward out of Hebuterne, and comprising part of the subterranean maze that Jünger frequently referred to as running from the Alps to the Sea. Positioned on the northern side of the Somme battlefield, it was not a contested position until 1917, when the English took it possession of the region after the titular battle, and when German forces took it back during a March offensive the following year. Jünger was assigned to its defense for that July.
By July 1918, little remained of the small forest that sat atop the mild chalk hill, as it, as well as most of the area surrounding the Somme, had been turned into a wasteland by incessant shelling and poisonous gas. The copse was no different; Jünger describes it in detail:
Shell upon shell has torn up the chalk, over which in any case there was only a thin layer of black humus, and a white powder has settled over what miserable traces of the undergrowth remain, so that they look as pale and sickly as if they had grown in a cellar. Roots and torn-up beeches and severed branches are thrown together in a coil—often hanging over the battered trenches, so that one has to pass by on all fours. The mighty trunks of the timber-trees, if not leveled with the ground, are docked of their tops, stripped of their bark and sapwood; only the hard, battered core remains in an army of bare masts, as though devoured by some horrible cancerous disease.3
This desolate trap of chalk and splinters made for a warm way to spend July that year, though the men were rotated around frequently enough—four to six days at the front, two in reserve, and four at rest in town. His assignment to the area was one tasked primarily with occupying the line. As most readers of Copse 125 will doubtlessly already have read The Storm of Steel, audiences will already be aware of trench warfare’s general praxis: long, drawn-out sieges with raids and small partisan activity carried out in between periods of routine shelling. Full-blown offensives along various parts of the line interrupted the daily life along the trench only periodically.
This means that most of the book’s narrative is consumed with back-and-forth passages of ex post facto ruminations on the war seamlessly integrated with sections drawn straight from his dairies. He speaks of finding creative ways to pass the time in the trench—such as saving his liquor and wine bottles so he could blow them up with powder from a flare gun, or exploding a trench rat with a gunpowder trap—in between more serious meditations on war and technology. Visitations to various localities, such as a particularly vivid excursion to Puisieux, southeast of the wood, also serve to highlight the apocalyptic scale of the war’s destruction. He mentions specifically how over this patch of ground
The number of shell-shot wagons was another indication that the offensive had been held up here. They were strewn about in fragments and the carcasses of teams were already beginning to crumble into lime. It is no wonder, either, that this devastated, trackless stretch of country, traversed by trenches and wire entanglements, afforded a mighty bulwark to the defense.4
Odd bits of paraphernalia make it into Jünger’s narrative. One chapter, dedicated to the twenty-second of July, consists of Jünger reviewing My Brown Book, something of an environmentalist volume by Hermann Löns. Löns was a naturalist and conservationist writer, who enlisted at the outbreak of the war and was killed during an assault near Reims just three weeks later. Jünger mentions reading it during the various periods of relative serenity that trench warfare naturally entails, remarking that “it is only by reading a book like this that one feels the link with the soil.”5
On the twenty-fifth, Jünger’s men are given orders to remain in place, although expectations to return to the front line trenches as relief are high. He uses this time to catch up on his letters, and includes one of them here. It will be quoted in more depth later in this piece, as it no doubt warranted inclusion in the volume due to Jünger’s ruminations on nationalism and the future of Germany.
Again, it’s hard not to make comparisons to The Storm of Steel. Where the earlier book is a depiction of war as a metaphysical experience, Copse 125, by including pieces like these, is far more slice-of-life. It presents experiences so mundane as to bring the daily realities of trench warfare into better focus. There’s an aesthetical component to this distinction that makes Copse 125 both a more enjoyable read, as it subjects its audiences to less visceral heights of danger and chaos, and somewhat of a grind, as much of it is more like an informal essay than a wartime memoir.
This somewhat mimics the war itself. Those readers expecting a sequel to The Storm of Steel, an expansion on the horrible incomprehensibility of the war’s carnage, would find Copse 125 to be puzzlingly boring. Mostly absent are narrations of raids, assaults, and brutal defenses. Where the sound of artillery bombardments and machine gun fire almost never leaves the reader’s ears during Storm, Copse presents trench warfare in all of its banality. When you weren’t a hair’s breadth away from sudden explosive death, you were finding ways of passing the time until relief arrived.
Technology & War Tactics
As mentioned, roughly a quarter to a third of the book focuses on various different means by which Jünger muses upon nationalism, technology, warfare, and tactics. These four topics frequently find themselves inextricable from one another, as Jünger connects technology with tactics, tactics with the changing state of warfare, and warfare with its ends in serving the nation. For Jünger, the industrialized nature of trench warfare has spurred the development of a new human being, building no doubt upon the ideological legacies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler. He writes:
And so I see in old Europe a new and commanding breed rising up, fearless and fabulous, unsparing of blood and sparing of pity, inured to suffering the worst and to inflicting it and ready to stake all to attain their ends—a race that builds machines and trusts to machines, to whom machines are not soulless iron, but engines of might which it controls with cold reason and hot blood. This puts a new face on the world.6
It’s hard not to see a certain anticipation of transhumanist cyberization in his predictions, though his augmentations reek of oil, gunpowder, and rifled steel. It’s easy to see where he’s coming from considering that his experiences had been shaped by the unprecedented use of massive weaponry to terraform the fields of northern France into an uninhabitable, burned out, poisoned desert. The contemporary imagination struggles to grasp how such a transformation of the earth and landscape was possible without the use of modern day nuclear weaponry and ordinance. For Jünger, it was just a daily reality.
Jünger brings this into perspective when he discusses the tactics of what a future with machine guns looks like: “zone” tactics, such as “that of a net into which the enemy may certainly penetrate here and there, but where he will at once be overwhelmed from all sides by a web of fire.”7 He similarly describes the need for mobility and the emphasis on smaller groups of men with more sophisticated technology holding points rather than holding lines. What he describes is effectively what was witnessed during the Second World War, and the direction that third generational warfare took: mobile units backed up by tanks and air support.
The tactics of European warfare had exhausted themselves by the time of Verdun, much less the Somme. This was plain for anyone involved in the fighting to see, and yet still it took another three years of siege, tunneling, artillery, charges, and tanks to drive the First World War to its conclusion. Jünger acknowledges the gradual change in trench warfare tactics, but expresses some frustration over how the situation itself hadn’t changed except in levels of comfort. While complex subterranean fortress structures of earth and concrete were built in the early days of the established front—ones even which warranted a modicum of leisure to them—by 1918, realities of infantry effectiveness and grenade tactics necessitated shallower, more exposed trenches that enabled better traversal and communication.
But because the nature of the war itself didn’t change, because it remained stuck in the methods of prolonged and costly sieges, there existed a sort of character necessary to a soldier if he was to survive. This is where we approach Jünger’s comments on human beings, which dominates several different sections of the book.
Nationalism
Jünger believed in a transformational nature of man that, again, was built off of the legacies of the German Idealists. A transcendent morality was necessary to make sense of the war, and by extension, of life. Lacking a religion, Jünger saw the nation, the people themselves, and their heritage to be a possible replacement.
We need the resolute virile strength that goes without saying and is expressed quietly and without gestures. Not too many decorations, not too much uniform, but more of that unemphatic attitude that goes without saying. Above all, a realization that our country is like the air that we all breathe. No one must put himself forward as one supremely called. There are things of which a man speaks little. They lie too deep to jump to his tongue. Such are the concerns of love and belief, and those of our country must again be one. Its roots must go once more so deep that they reach the bottommost strength.8
This carries with it an implicit assumption that each soldier, no matter which nation he is fighting for, is obliged to carry that nation with himself into battle. Everyone called to fight should hold nationalistic pride. It’s such an obvious assumption that it need not even be said; these aren’t the words of a German who believes that nationalism is something that should be unique to the German people, but rather the words of a soldier who recognizes what war is and is supposed to be. Jünger believed in a certain sense of German uniqueness, to be sure, but holding to a simple sense of nationalism was not part of that.
It is unfortunate, but expected, that Jünger’s generally secular upbringing left him with nowhere to root the transcendent values he’d relied on to make sense of the war and human behavior. This led to a certain racial idolatry present in his identification of the nation and the race with “the bottommost strength.” It is not God that keeps men on the level, not God in which is found the perfect exaltation of virtue, not God with whom we we seek to resonate; instead, as was popular at the time, it is the race that exalts these virtues, and it is common blood in which they are found.
This is worth commenting on not out of a liberal squeamishness over racialism (as readers of the blog should recognize), but rather because Jünger’s thought at this time falls so perfectly in line with similar modes of thought today: that of reactionaries unsure of, unaware of, or unwilling to come to terms with the truths of the Catholic faith. So it seems that when one’s gaze does not rest on the Cross, it will confuse the blood flowing off of it with his own, and seek to find the organizing principles of morality and virtue in ancestry. Jünger’s long life ended after a year or so’s time with the Sacraments, however, as he converted at the end of his centenarian life, while his thoughts immortalized in Copse 125 were sprung from the pen of a man just shy of thirty.
He elaborates on this, however, making it clear that whatever racial idolatry he holds to is vague and not done for a purpose in and of itself. Jünger recognizes that hierarchy not only exists in the world, but that it is necessary. He recognizes the distinctions between nations, that these distinctions tend to be expressed in ways unspoken of and not always consciously acknowledged, and that the plurality—but distinctness—of these nations is probably a good thing. And he recognizes that all of these things are realities and not simply invented constructs of civilized minds. Commenting on the liberalism of the turn of the century, he writes:
Toleration on all sides, of which we were so proud, must be seen for what it is—a negative quality. He who has no real belief in anything can certainly be tolerant and to spare; but only intolerance has any force behind it. The conviction that excludes all else, the glow of fanaticism—that is what we lack, the mind made up and set that makes us look back today to the Middle Ages with other eyes than those of the Enlightenment, and that of itself inspires us with a still unconfessed longing for the Catholic Church after our atheistic upbringing in evangelical surroundings. The day of the enlightenment is over. The war completed its downfall and throws us back of necessity upon feeling.9
All of this sounds pretty familiar to contemporary audiences, and the implicit exhortation—don’t buy into the lies that liberalism tries to sell you—is a welcome remark. Notice also the recognition that at one point, everyone recognized the authority of the Catholic Church as the sole safeguard of the Logos, but centuries of ideological breakdown and decades of German social engineering degraded this understanding to the point that even Jünger expresses the sentiment that the Church is beyond reach.
This brings us to how he conceives of history, as well. Jünger’s view follows the general trend found in Hegelian and German intellectuals: a vaguely depersonalized force that flows half-inevitably from one period into the next. Jünger may have had private interests in holding to such a depersonalized view, particularly at the time, and it reveals itself in most of his early work. Even on the topic of defeat:
Certainly it is easier simply to hide behind the excuse that the enemy was too strong. But that means giving to mere numbers an importance that should always be denied them, more especially by the weaker side. The experiences of life should always be taken as a challenge and never made into excuses. Whether the enemy won by the preponderance of material, whether he stood more solidly behind his cause, whether his workmen showed more intelligence, greater readiness for sacrifices and a closer bond with the state, whether his tactics overcame us, whether he bribed more recklessly, whether there was a deeper patriotism in his leading men, whether he had a better government, whether he had more railways or fewer illiterates—it will always come to a difference which must be overhauled and outbid. In this way alone, and not by talking about it, can the right to conquer be created.10
There’s a certain interest in abdicating, for the enemy, the responsibility due to the victor; in any conflict, he wants to believe, there is no one who wins so much as someone who loses. This is a strain in Jünger’s thought that pervades all of his early work and continues through much of his life. It speaks to an unwillingness to directly grapple with defeat. Although he appropriately acknowledges that no excuses should be served up by the loser, as excuses provide breeding grounds for weakness and sloth to fester, he offers this as an explanation that ultimately holds no one to account. It is as if to rob a victor of his right to claim it by insisting, no, it’s our fault that we lost. True, sometimes it is. But that’s part of the deadly equation of battle. Sometimes you are simply bested. Sometimes you do everything right and still lose. There’s something admirable in guarding against automatically blaming the enemy for their strength, but it’s not appropriate to generalize such losses the way he seeks to.
Conclusion
The book ends with its longest chapter: a brutal four day battle whose depiction more than accounts for the comparative lack of action in the rest of the volume. The Germans eventually lose the copse, pushed back by a particularly brutal English offensive that was precipitated by some of the heaviest shelling then experienced by the wood. Jünger and his men are sent from Puisieux to relieve the battered group still holding out, but they lose the copse the following night. Puisieux alley, which serves as the main thoroughfare between the front and the reserve stations, is so heavily shelled that merely traversing its mile of sunken road is alone a commendable feat of survival.
The front manages to hold, however, as they reestablish it behind the copse and, by the third day, have secured their position enough to begin shelling their previously held position with their own artillery. Jünger and his men—those of that battalion still alive—are recalled; their job done—failed, admittedly, but as Jünger admits, through no real fault their own in either administrative or disciplinarian senses.
It’s hard not to write a glowing review of this book. This republication of Copse 125 by Rogue Scholar Press affords contemporary audiences a look at the dimension of warfare that The Storm of Steel leaves out. Its narrative is looser, more forgiving, and more personal—yet at the same time, more grandiose in its aims; it synthesizes together the genres of memoir, essay, and tactical survey in order to produce a work far more insightful and enjoyable than first appearances might indicate.
Jünger takes the time to lay out the battlefield, explain the landscape, a place landmarks into the geography of the region for the reader. With the aid of a simple map, even a contemporary map that just depicts the French countryside as we see it today, it’s not difficult to identify where and how the action is unfolding as he describes it. This brings the experiences detailed in Copse 125 into crystal clarity. It’s not just the story of some officer stationed to an inexplicable patch of wood for a month. It’s the chronicle of real events, and Jünger’s efforts to specify these details underscore it all.
Rogue Scholar Press should be commended for returning this volume to print, as it is in my opinion a book any reactionary dealing with the present culture war should get around to reading. It reminds us of how to galvanize against modernity, even if—being moderns ourselves—we can never really escape its influence. Although we will not find ourselves in the trenches, we must certainly learn to fight the informational war being waged at present; a strong sense of identity, fortified against the propaganda and rooted in the foundations of nation and God, is necessary. Copse 125, ultimately, is about all of these things.
The book is littered with typos, unfortunately, but that comes with the territory. Basil Creighton’s translation reads every bit as smoothly as his reputation would merit, and serves as a great augmentation to his 1929 translation of The Storm of Steel.
For Jünger the war was life lived wedged uncomfortably between certain death. That discomfort was the same felt by the steel ingot as it gets subjected to molten temperatures and hammered between mallet and anvil. The war was this life lived out to the extreme.
Every day is a proof that the will knows no impossibilities. It must be reckoned, too, that the weight rests on each individual man. There can be no thought of being led or overlooked. I have only time now and then when we are passing an utterly flattened stretch of trench to run round and take a look at the broken chain of shadows now lost to sight in the darkness, now flying apart in the light of bursting shells.11
173-74.
269.
366.
482.
5179.
629.
732.
8161.
9208-209.
10200-201.
11237.
