Question

its a reading response for my history class. how does Ernst Junger's enthusiasm compare with how the writers Samuel Hynes discusses saw the war?

Answer 1

With the perishing of so many men, many of whom had so enthusiastically volunteered to join the army at the start of the war, so too did the spirit of this voluntary army and as Keegan puts it, the vital optimism of British life that has never been recovered die. Authors, philosophers and historians saw the Battle of the Somme as the battle that changed everything, and Ernst Junger claims in his memoir Storm of Steel that the Battle marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war. While Henry Williamson, who fought throughout the war, believed that it marked not only the end of the old order, but the end of ideas that had endured a thousand years. One of those ideas that died was the faith in the reliability of words, both written and spoken. While newspapers had initially focused on the glory of the war, adhering to a theme of rhetorical reshaping of ruin and destruction into glory) a perspective in which the truth of the war was heavily edited and often propagandized, with the loss of faith in the war and in writing, newspaper correspondents were starting to acknowledge that they must speak the truth even if the truth was beyond description. But if these correspondents, who were always at a safe distance from any action when on the battlefields, found this war to be beyond description then what must those men directly involved in combat have been feeling? Correspondents agreed that this war seemed to them not only beyond description, but almost beyond imagination itself—beyond all boundaries of known experience, and some believed that the events of war not only could not but should not be described.