462
PARTISAN REVIEW
small animals to discover therein the pulsebeats of a naturally ordered
universe. And where in the old conception order was completely
secular, divine support must now be invoked.
Yet one significant point of continuity between the old and
new periods remains. Juenger's book is still permeated by the old
sense of the futility of man's action in a world ruled by destiny:
"Of what avail are human understanding and human will when
disaster has long been written in the stars?" Thus
The Marble Cliffs
is hardly a call to action. But though projected out of resignation
and despair, it still has the will to express its author; and its publica–
tion must certainly be looked upon as an act of great moral courage.
The Marble Cliffs
came out while Juenger was with the army,
and for a long time no news was heard of him until, through the
Swiss press, news of a new book,
Gardens and Streets,
arrived here.
This title itself is significant: while the book about the First World
War had been called
Thunders of Steel,
the diary of this Second
World War is quietly entitled
Gardens and Streets.
The book deals
chiefly with the campaign against France in 1939-40, and its tone
is immediately set in one of the first notations: "Mobilization, I look
at myself in my lieutenant's uniform-not without irony." Nothing
is left of the early enthusiasm for war. War is still a
destiny,
a natural
and cosmic phenomenon outside the sphere of human deliberation
and purpose; but Juenger, detached and ironical, now experiences it
from the outside. He "does his duty," and he still admires certain
soldierly qualities, but what he is obsessed with now is his own inner
being. "At certain crossroads of our youth Bellona and Athene might
appear to us, the one with the promise to teach us the
art
to lead
twenty regiments into battle, the other with the gift to combine
twenty words into a perfect phrase.
It
could be that we might choose
the second laurel, which is rarer (\nd grows invisibly on the edge of
the rocks." To which the indignant reviewer of the
Voelkischer
Beobachter
replied dryly: "Twenty regiments still are of greater im–
portance to us."
The book is written in that "slave language" that flourishes
under all tyrannies: we often find it difficult to fathom the real
intent below layers of allusion and unessential meaning. Yet the
meaning is unmistakable when the man who once sang the beauties
of the tank now writes: "Two tanks on the village square. I crawled
into one and had to find again that, as usual, I feel uncomfortable
in these things which smell of oil, gas and rubber."
