Ernst Jünger - Blood and Intellect
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Let's take part in the company assault [Trans: Sturm]. Not as we front-line soldiers actually and so often did, but with our mind’s eye, which is able to look calmly and objectively at the manifold variety of unfolding events, and with the clear mind of someone not threatened by any personal danger. Let us try to see what is happening there in that blood-stained allegory for human existence.
We see a line of armed men standing in some trench in the zone of fire. All orders have been given, everything has been arranged that needs to be prepared. Officers once again hurry along the groups, hastily questioning and making the final arrangements. Down there, the bottom of that ravine must be seized, the place at which the heaviest fire of our artillery strikes has created smoke screen. For many days, the execution of this operation was discussed in every detail, every possibility which could arise was considered. At a site exactly replicating the aerial photographs, live ammunition was fired in a manner recreating conditions of battle, and every single man is exactly aware of what he has to perform. It is a clearly defined task that given by the will to the mind, and the mind has done its best to solve this task. It has divided the problem into a number of factors, and after careful consideration it has put each of them back into the framework of the task. He has disassembled the whole and put it together into a new, well thought-out whole. There seems to be nothing more to do than to implement this new plan, just as an engineer constructs a bridge after he has calculated the intended power and any possible resistance, and has calculated the outcome. Of course, the engineer has greater certainty, while the company has to work in the element of uncertainty. But it should be said that the apparently firmest bridges have already collapsed, and secondly, the mind knows how to include chance into the system of its causal relations by means of a probability calculation. This or that group may be destroyed by artillery strikes, but reserve groups are destined to continue with the operation. The left flank advances against a particularly fortified section, if the assault fails there, it will be all the more quickly advanced on the right flank, and the end result will be the same. Everything is anticipated - down to every detail, from the mood of the troops to the nature of the psyche of the enemy. Everything is provided by the intellect and is translated by it into language, with a clear understanding of the situation.
Now the red signal for the attack goes up, and with this fire signal the system of force, in which the performance of the company is realized, enters into a completely new and different lawfulness, into a lawfulness which governs life more tightly and more bloodily, but which the human mind, in the very mathematical environment of our great city and a late civilization, no longer wants to recognize as the really compelling one. Only in the case of wars, great festivals and real revolutions does this lawfulness intervene directly in the world of rigid forms and bonds, in the case of events in which the earthly force of life again seizes the formations of the spirit, which would have liked to cut out of the cosmos an artificial world determined by concepts.
Let us remain in this allegory. At first, of course, the troops and squads still step out into the open country in a determined and deliberate order. Each section is separated from the others by a space calculated according to the circumstances. Each man has his prescribed place. Small disorder is compensated for by the orders of the leaders.
But now the foreign, the hostile encroaches on this order. A powerful shell lands in the middle of the dark, stretched human chain, some people are hit, and the others turn away from this calamity, running in opposite directions. The company is torn into two parts, from which two new units are formed, units that are not mentioned in any regulations. And now, while advancing, the rifles and machine guns also start to fire from the target. In a flash, the company splinters into small groups. Here people are killed or wounded, there others throw themselves into the funnels to wake up, still others rush forward in hasty leaps. No more orders are given and carried out, the hasty and excited cries that are exchanged mean something completely different.
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