This is a post script to our WWI series Mud and Shells. Copse 125 was written by Ernst Junger in 1930, 12 years after the war. In this piece he revisits a two month period living and fighting in a shell blasted patch of forest known only on English maps as the Rossignol Wood. This piece goes beyond Junger’s earlier writing in Storm of Steel to address the higher ideals of life on the front from courage to nationalism to the total rewriting of military tactics that happened in the smoky shell blasted plains of western Europe from 1914 through 1918.

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