War and reconciliation – An Irishman’s Diary about Ernst Jünger and Guillemont

Guillemont is a tiny village in Picardy, with a population of 120 spread among 50 houses. It belies its size with a huge significance in the consciousness of many nations in Europe and beyond. Upon entering the village one is struck by its calmness, with no signs of commerce or services, only a few detached homes and a fading red-bricked church, all built of a same age. The church is flanked by two memorials, on the right by the village’s memorial to its war dead, and on the left, a granite replica the famous Ginchy Cross, an Irish Cross to commemorate the victory of the British army’s 16th Irish Division in the Battles of Guillemont and Ginchy in September 1916. This victory was bought at the cost of 1,200 Irish lives and 4,000 Irish wounded, in a battle of little tactical sense and of negligible impact on the war.

It was during this battle that 18-year-old Lieut Emmet d’Alton witnessed the death of Tom Kettle, the former Home Rule MP, the same d’Alton who as a 24-year-old major general in the Free State army, cradled the head of the dying Michael Collins at Beal na Bláth.

This convulsion of the Battle of the Somme started at noon on September 3rd and saw the German army’s positions on Guillemont High Street overwhelmed by a rush of Leinster and Connaught battalions, in a bayonet-charging onslaught.

The drab exterior of the church gives way to a shockingly bright and incongruously vivid, yellow interior. The walls are topped by a timber roof, trussed by ornately painted roof beams bearing shamrocks and other symbols. The left rear of the church has a marble memorial to the 16th Division and its constituent battalions along with plaques of various regimental associations.

Something much more surprising is found on the baptistry rails opposite. There, a large photograph of a German soldier hangs, a very different shrine with an account of his time at Guillemont. In a spirit of magnanimity, the community has erected this memorial to Ernst Jünger.

He was an officer during the battle but had survived through being wounded and evacuated, whereas his entire unit had been wiped out. Jünger was a war diarist, author of Storm of Steel, described by Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph as "the greatest war memoir I have ever read ".

Though wounded 14 times, Jünger survived and was present in Verdun in 1984 when French president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl held hands in that great moment of reconciliation, and promised that France and Germany would never again war with each other.

The community of Guillemont has named the street above the church the rue Ernst Jünger, and the street below the Rue de la 16E div. Irlandaise.

Perhaps equally poignant is to discover that many of the defenders of Guillemont at that time were not only Germans but also Danes.

The Danish province of Schleswig was annexed by the nascent Germany in the war of 1864. In an uncanny mirroring of the nationalist Irish experience, Schleswig Danish leaders exhorted their young men to enlist in the German army in order to gain respect and trust for their nationality.

Historian Peter Englund in his book The Sorrow and the Beauty recounts the diary of Kresten Andresen from north of Flensburg. Andresen tells of the terror of his friends and comrades while under attack at Guillemont.

He disappeared without trace following a British attack. In a further irony, his homeland North Schleswig was returned to Denmark in 1920.

Irish and British, French, Germans and Danes, as well as many others, were all entwined in the horrors and tragedies of Guillemont and Ginchy.