 Hours such as these were without doubt the most awful of the whole war. You cower in a heap alone in a hole and fill yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics have become utterly meaningless and absurd. When you think it, the lump of metal that will crush you into a shape with nothing may have started on its course. Your discomfort is concentrated in your ear, then that tries to distinguish amid the uproar, the swirl of your own death rushing near. It is dark too, and you must find in yourself alone all the strength we're holding out. You can't get up and with a blasé laugh light a cigarette in the wondering sight of your companions, nor can you be encouraged by the sight of a friend clipping a monocle to his eye to observe a hit on the traverse behind you. You know that not even a cock will crow in your hit. Well why don't you jump up and rush into the night until you collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see you, yet someone watches you. Unknown perhaps to yourself, there is someone within who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells, duty and honor. You know that this is your place in the battle, and that a whole people relies on you to do your job. You feel if I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever after blush at every word of praise. You clench your teeth and stay. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Advanced, and we are back with another edition of Tactical Book Review. Today's book is The Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger, and this is the original 1929 translation. Let me just say the outset, this is the best historical war memoir thing I've ever read. It's fantastic, and I highly recommend you read it. I have read a few, you know, like actual like memoirs, right? And I've read, you know, a variety of different history books. I'm a big fan of military history, and this is just the best one I've read. It's the most enjoyable one I've read. And the reason for that is that Ernst Junger writes with a beautiful poetry that captures the absolute annihilation of body and soul in the midst of this hellscape of war. And he has this beautiful way of talking about it, and he has this great way of explaining kind of his views on it. It's a very zoomed in view, right? Like, I don't know World War I super well. And so sometimes he's talking about battles in places, and I'm like, I'm not sure what battle that is. So it's just like his perspective, right? It's no like macro view of the war at all. It's just his perspective, which is great. And that quote I read in the beginning really exemplifies to me this book. He talks very straightforwardly and honestly about the horror of World War I, and he also has this like romantic undertone of why things still matter and finding meaning and value in life in the middle of a arguably meaningless hellscape, right? So if you're not familiar with World War I, you should be. It's called the First Modern War, right? The reason you think of war as nihilistic and just, you know, without hope or joy or adventure and just view it as this kind of dirty death thing is because of World War I. Because that's what we learned, we being humans, in World War I was that, you know, when we started having these massive wars with artillery shells and tanks and all this other stuff, the whole romanticism of war was swept away and has been since then, right? But he still has these ideas of like these romantic ideas and not that war is romantic. I hope you get my meaning here, but he has these romantic ideas of like duty and honor and there's things that still matter even when it seems like nothing matters. You're just waiting for a shell to fall on you and kill you. And he holds those two things in justice position really well and I really like this book. I think it's what makes it so entertaining to read. So I would highly recommend this. In addition to that, look as a American Minuteman tactical warfighter person, you should be reading memoir books, okay? You know, experience is the best teacher as much as you can learn from other people's experiences. So when people like Ernst Younger, who lived through World War I, one of the most horrific wars in human history, he fought again, I think for like three-ish years, was wounded seven times, seven times, okay? And almost died, I mean, I don't know how many times. You read this book and you're like, how is this guy still alive? Because apparently God wanted him to live and that's the answer to that. And he's compiled all that in a book for you. Now you don't have to agree with everything he says, right? There's some things you could disagree with or whatever, but we should be reading war memoirs to learn from people who've gone before us. Again, if other people, if experience is the best teacher, let's learn from other people's experiences as much as possible because it's much cheaper and less costly to you personally to learn from them rather than have to live through that. And hey, maybe you don't make it, right? So I think we should be reading war memoirs in general. I would highly recommend this one. One, it's just super entertaining. But two, again, he has insights into how things should work and what the best way is to command and what the value is of being an officer, because again, he was an officer for several years. So he has a really good understanding of how to help people in the midst of battle, how to lead people in battle, which he does a lot. So again, highly like this book, would highly recommend this book, you can pick other things up circumstantially, just like how independent he was in making decisions, right? Like he's out here on the front in World War I and he like, ah, besides, we're going to do a patrol or raid on the other trench. And you know, these days, I can't really imagine that happening without like going all the way up to like the Pentagon or something and getting permission. But anyway, that's a different rant. Point is, highly recommend this book. I think you can learn a lot from it. And the very least, you'll be entertained. So please get yourself a copy of the Storm of Steel by Ernst Younger. Do brave deeds and endure.