Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918;

COPSE 125 was one of a quadrilogy of works Ernst Jünger wrote on his experiences as a storm trooper for Germany during the First World War. The most famous of these, of course, is THE STORM OF STEEL, which made him a celebrity, but COPSE 125 is a very different type of book, and it's no surprise to me that some who read and enjoyed STORM posted their disappointment here. STORM was an "external" memior of Jünger's four years as a front-line soldier, a period which saw him wounded sixteen times and awarded with Prussia's highest decoration for bravery, the Pour le Merité, which was also awarded to Rommel and Richtofen. By "external" I mean that the book deals almost exclusively with what happened to Jünger during the war - what he saw, what he did, what was done to him. It did NOT record what he felt, and many who read it dismissed him as a blunted, cold-blooded automaton, incapable of real human feeling, and to this day (he died only recently, at 103) he is villified as the "Godfather of fascism" for glorifying war and rationalizing the unspeakable. In fact, Jünger was a remarkably sensitive man, and withheld his feelings about combat to make them the subject of his subsequent works (including the long essay, "War as an Inward Experience"); it seems his true "crime" was in failing to conclude that war was a complete evil ("Life can only assert itself in its own destruction", he writes) and it is probably no coincidence that his harshest critics are people who have never been shot at. COPSE 125 is a battle memior of sorts, which Jünger wrote using the journal he kept during a stay at Pieseux-au-Mont in 1918, but it is not by any means a "combat" book. In fact, Jünger deliberately picked from his experiences a relatively quiet on the line to use as his source material. What he wanted to explore, among other things, was the effect of trench warfare on the human heart and soul, as well as the possible nature of war in the future, using both the successes and the failure of the German Army during the war as his learning tool. Anyone familiar with Jünger's novels knows that his prose style mingles brilliant, almost poetic prose with long, turgid, extremely German descents into philosophy, history and metaphysics, and COPSE 125 is no exception. Many of the passages are so beautifully written that they stick in your mind like an arrow, such as when he writes, "The meaning of life is not in the poor struggle for existence but the irresistible urge to power - and overwhelming power." Or, when discussing the perennial victory of fanaticism over the intellect, explains, "A sound opinion finds advocates, but no martyrs." Others are so dense and overwritten they are virtually impenetrable. And yet I would unhesitatingly say that while COPSE is no easy, breezy read, it is compelling enough that I have re-read it several times, and on each occasion gained some wisdom from its teachings.