Of the fourteen who had set out, only four returned, and Kienitz's patrol had suffered heavy losses as well. My dejection was a little helped by the words of the stout Oldenburger Dujesiefken, who, while I was getting my hand bandaged up in the dugout, was outside telling his comrades what had befallen, finishing with the sentence: 'I must say, though, that Lieutenant Jünger is really something else: my word, the sight of him vaulting over those barricades!'
Then, almost all of us with bandaged heads or hands, we marched through the woods to the regimental headquarters. Colonel von Oppen welcomed us, and sat us down to coffee. He was disappointed at our lack of success, but still told us we'd done our best. We felt comforted. Then I was put in a car, and taken to divisional command, who wanted a full report. A few hours before, I had had enemy hand-grenades exploding in my ears; now I was enjoying sitting back in a powerful car, being whisked along the highway, eating up the miles.
The general staff officer received me in his office. He was pretty cut up, and I saw to my irritation that he was trying to leave the blame for the failure of our mission at my door. When he jabbed his finger at the map and asked questions like: 'Don't you think you should have turned right into this communication trench instead?' I realized that the kind of confusion where notions like right and left just go out the window was quite outside his experience. For him the whole thing had been a plan; for us an intensely experienced reality.
~ From Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, p. 189