Alexander Ulanov. Depths of War

Ernst Junger. In steel thunderstorms. - St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal, 2000.

“The mother of everything is war,” said Heraclitus.

“The spectacle of individual units and messengers hurriedly scurrying through the shelled area, every now and then throwing themselves onto the ground and surrounded on all sides by the whirlwinds of the earth, was truly breathtaking. So, looking at the cards with fate, you easily forget about your own safety.” Ernst Junger saw the First World War at close range - four years in the infantry at the forefront. Got enough. "Five rifle shots, two shell fragments, four hand grenades, one shrapnel bullet and two bullet fragments, the entrance and exit holes of which left twenty scars on me." He did not decorate the war. Dirt, exhausting trench work, sleepless nights, terrible wounds. Only the names of the battle sites and the names of those killed change. The sounds are the crunching of the skull of a soldier nearby from a bullet, the wheezing of a dying man whose trachea was broken by a shrapnel. But what Junger found in the war was not at all what the heroes of Remarque, Aldington and Hemingway found.

For Jünger, war is a transformation of man, a departure from the warm and insipid everyday life. "A healthy joy in danger, a knightly desire to survive the battle." The most extreme states are therefore the most important. Fight in the trenches, where there is no retreat, no mercy. Or sitting under fire, where a person is just a target for guns, and what is needed is not a desperate impulse, but patience to stand still. Because “you can recognize a person only by seeing him in trouble.” The first to attack are often not those from whom you expect it. Only in the nightmare of battle does a person reveal his true essence. Only in the ultimate state, “when anxiety, unable to grow further, is replaced by almost cheerful indifference,” does a person become himself. “There is a kind of fear that fascinates, like an unexplored land... I did not experience fear, but an uplifting and almost demonic lightness; I was also attacked by unexpected bouts of laughter, which nothing could stop.” (Something in these sentiments, which later brought Jünger closer to the ideologists of fascism, seems familiar to the Russian reader... Well, yes, “there is rapture in battle, and a dark abyss on the edge...” And a little further: “Everything, everything that threatens with death, for the mortal heart it conceals inexplicable pleasures - immortality, perhaps a guarantee!" The sun of Russian poetry...)

Moreover, Jünger also has immortality, death and fate are nearby. The battlefield smells of corpses, which there is no way to remove under the relentless fire. But this smell does not surprise Jünger, it is “an integral part of this area... This heavy and sweetish breath did not seem disgusting at all; moreover, it excited, mixing with the caustic vapors of explosives - it was a state of enthusiastic insight that can only be caused the greatest proximity of death." A person before death, free from fears and hopes, acquires maximum authenticity. The sergeant major, dying in the infirmary from blood poisoning, apologizes for disturbing everyone’s sleep, and in the last minutes imitates the orderly’s pronunciation. “For the first time I felt what a great thing death is.” In war, a person is closest to fate, which decides who will live. The most prudent and the most indifferent survive. They abolish death. "Death lost its meaning, the will to live switched to something greater, and this made everyone blind and indifferent to their own fate." Unity with other people is also found in battle, where everyone knows what to do, forming with others a single body through which thoughts are transmitted without words. “Battle binds, but inaction scatters.”

Junger's gaze is always calm. Already in 1914, he went to the front not only in search of extraordinary heroic events, but also with a notebook in his pocket. The enthusiasm in volunteer Junger died quickly. Observation remains. In order to “examine everything calmly and slowly ,” Jünger took advantage of every respite. He walks along trenches left by the enemy, collects fossilized sea urchins (dug up during trench work) and bullets from the skulls of the dead, admires the fantastic and gloomy landscape of the battlefield, the play of light in the ruins in the snow. Or disassembles a “strange little device” that turns out to be a French hand grenade. (He was not alone! A certain lieutenant brought “a bunch of unexploded shells into his dugout and amused himself by unscrewing the fuses.”) “The main thing for a soldier is not to get bored” - and Junger takes part in forays into enemy trenches.

The tension of will brings out of a person such strengths that he himself did not know about. (And now I remember one of the pilots - friends of the creator of the fairy tale about the Little Prince: “I managed to do something that no cattle could do.”) Jünger has difficulty gathering the runners to organize a defense - and then he cannot lead these same people away , heated by battle. And fatigue turns the other way. “If you fall, you will remain lying. No one will help. No one knows whether he will come back alive. Attacks every day, but you can’t break through ,” says the exhausted infantryman. “There is nothing left in this voice except great male indifference. You can go into battle with such men ,” comments Junger. After extreme stress comes happiness. Jünger’s brother, wounded in the counterattack and then lying for thirteen hours in the crater, writes: “And then, into the mortal fatigue in which I was, a feeling of happiness penetrated, which grew more and more and did not leave me in the following weeks. I thought about death, but this thought no longer bothered me. Everything became surprisingly simple; thinking: “You’re okay!”, I fell into sleep.”

Jünger captures moments of the triumph of spirit over matter, will over circumstances. His heroes are not supermen, but those who have “a will stronger than their body.” Some of them are short-sighted or weak, but these are the ones who can only be killed, not defeated. Jünger admits that by giving a thrashing to the hidden soldiers, you dispel cowardice in yourself. And then another book comes to mind again - this time the Bible. "The spirit is strong, but the flesh is weak." What, if not his will, maintained Jünger in complete clarity of consciousness until his death at 103 years old - although he drank, smoked, tried LSD, and 20 wounds are no joke. Maybe Jünger is crazy, but this is madness based on calculation, a tradition of precise thinking that has continued in Europe almost since Aristotle, on the basis of the most severe self-discipline - and not on a daring scale. The book sometimes looks like a tactics textbook: how to get through the shelling zone, how to approach a dangerous point.

"I have always tried to treat the enemy without hatred and to evaluate him according to his courage." Jünger admires the dying English sergeant with a pipe in his mouth, and the Scots going on the attack (one of whom will send Jünger a letter after the war). For Junger, war is more of a deadly sport. Moreover, the result of the battle is less important than the behavior of the person in it. Jünger goes into his last attack two months before the end of the war, knowing in advance that both this attack and the entire war are lost, but with the same elation. “The dusk deepened so much that the poppies in the wild fields with bright green grass took on a strange rich color.” It's easier to go into battle among flowers. There “the consciousness penetrates into the simple soul that it is included in an eternal cycle and that the death of one is, in essence, not such a significant event.” And the seriously wounded Junger in the hospital opens Tristram Shandy on the page he closed before the attack.

Yes, of course - the cult of power, totalitarianism, the impersonal, instincts and other things. Perhaps Jünger also turned out to be so popular because he offered meaning to millions of people who went through the war, to those who did not want - did not have the power? - put an end to your efforts and sacrifices and recognize what happened as bloody nonsense and a mistake. Maybe we will be overwhelmed by books of “strong personalities” - there are now enough prerequisites for the manifestation of such characters.

But this is the ultimate experience, paid for fairly and in full. Experience of freedom and death. Jünger - in the depths, at the foundations of European culture, at the sources of its energy. Acquaintance with his works is just beginning; Russian is the last European language in which they have not yet been published.