When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, the nightmare which had haunted German leaders and military men for decades became real – they faced war on two fronts. Undaunted by the scale of this disastrous gamble, enthusiastic recruits were rushed to battle, hoping for quick, decisive, and dramatic victories. They little suspected the hells they hurried towards, or what transformations awaited them there. After the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, which aimed for decisive victory in a blow to France, the Western Front bogged down into a prolonged war of position and entrenchment, with great battles of attrition fought over small, bloodied salients, gas attacks and bombardments lasting days. These ordeals formed a western front-experience which affected a generation of young Germans and was mythologized into a potent political idea. Out of this experience came the lunge for a new model of heroism in the elite storm-troops, idealized by writers of the front generation like Ernst Jünger. This myth claimed that a new man was born in storms of steel, hammered into being by the poundings of industrial warfare and the “battle of matériel.” Shaped by “battle as an inner experience,” the hardened front soldier of the West seemed an answer to the modernity of war.