454
PARTISAN REVIEW
mental process, it is
destiny
itself. Its cosmic experience generates a
new race of heroes: men no longer individuals, indeed the very
opposite of the modern individual, no longer dreading pain and
death, functioning only as parts of the huge machine into which they
have been sucked. Through their absorption into mechanical warfare,
they transcend the atomized and devitalized individual of nineteenth–
century liberalism. Juenger finds the slogans of the patriotic romantics
meaningless and dangerous. Man, "thrown" into the existence of
the warrior, is disclosed to himself in his extreme situation, where his
being no longer stands in need of justification: war itself does not
need to
be
justified, it
is.
In the last analysis, even the side on which
one fights does not matter. There is little reason to prefer one or the
other national camp; it is not the difference between nations which is
"the center of the conflict, but the difference between two ages: the
new age devours the declining one." To fight for the "museum cul–
ture" of the nineteenth century-the comfortable values of a bour–
geois era-is to waste one's energy. The heroic warrior scorns vulgar
satisfactions: his existence has become meaningful through the in–
volvement in total combat.
The First World War, especially in its late mechanical phase,
discloses the pattern of the future. The tank driver of the War be–
comes the tractor driver of the Postwar. The War has released the
power of technology, and henceforth the symbol of our age
is
the
cold streamlined grayness of steel. "To the individual the renunciation
of individuality appears an impoverishment; it signifies death. But
to the
type
it provides a key to another world, no longer subject to
evaluation by the traditional yardsticks." 1914-1918 was the over–
ture to the total mobilization of society; and in
The Adventurous
Heart
( 1929),
The Worker
( 1932) and
Leaves and Stones
( 1934),
Juenger extends this experience of the War into the Postwar world.
The regulated functional man emerges as a new
type,
hard
and ruthless, a cog in the technological process. The question whether
he dominates the machine or the machine dominates him ceases to
have meaning. Man and machine become one: through their in–
tegration a new beauty and a new order are achieved. The new
world will be built when the organized Front of the War engulfs
the whole rear of society:
The picture of war as a military action gradually merges with the wider
picture of a gigantic industrial operation. Beside the armies that meet on
the battlefield arise the new armies engaged in communication, foodstuffs,
armaments-the array of total industry. In the final phase there is not
a single action, not even a woman sewing on her machine at home, which
