Jünger was just a belated incarnation of the type. The nineteenth century, with its medicine and machines and positive thinking, always had a shadow disdaining it: the reactionary dandy. It was a German version of the romantic malady Baudelaire had diagnosed and examined with more ferocity: la grande maladie de l’horreur du domicile. Anything to participate, not to have to stay at home! Surely the war had to supply us with what we wanted the great, the hallowed, the overwhelming experience…. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken atmosphere of blood and roses. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. Storm of Steel was a marvel of detached observation in the midst of catastrophe: “Rank weeds climb up and through the barbed wire, symptomatic of a new and different type of flora taking root on the fallow fields.” But it was also embellished with mini arias that tended to describe a theory: Head and neck were gone, white cartilage gleamed out of reddish-black flesh.” “One man had lost his head, and the end of his torso was like a great sponge of blood.” He served with distinction on the Western Front, a landscape of spectral horror that he evoked in his first and best book, Storm of Steel, a celebrated memoir composed of raw chunks of close-up, uninterpreted detail whose emblem might be the corpses he depicted with such panache and such severity: “A headless torso was jammed in some shot-up beams. Jünger ran away from school to join the Foreign Legion in 1913, and the following year enlisted in the German army to fight in World War I. But the mystique he enjoyed and cultivated was really a product of early youth. This was partly because he lived through the entire experiment in historical mayhem produced by the European twentieth century-he was born in Heidelberg in 1895 and died in 1998, at the age of 102. Some writers become imbued with the charisma of a history, well beyond the charisma of their writing, and one of these is Ernst Jünger. Ernst Jünger (on horseback) with German troops, Paris, 1941 1.