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World War One in Fantastic Fiction: The Dark Star

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One of the many ongoing series at this blog is World War One in Fantastic Fiction, and it’s time we got back to it, this time with scholarly accoutrements.

I came across a mention to this novel in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia’s World War One entry.

Review: The Dark Star, Robert W. Chambers, 1916.

First serialized starting in the October 1916 issue of Cosmopolitan, this novel puts most of its fantastic content at the beginning in a prelude of dark prophecy and occult matters.

After a poem featuring two of the novel’s characters and a bit of prophecy, we get a section, “Children of the Star”, which, in narration sweeping into the recent past and around the world, introduces us to the novel’s characters.

We hear about the Dark Star Erlik and how it is a “a bloody horoscope” cast over the births of millions. The Dark Star makes a a 200,000 year orbit, and it’s come around to effect Earth again. (Chambers’ 1920 novel The Slayer of Souls also features the followers of Erlik according to the editorial notes in Delphi Classics’ Chambers collection.)

Those millions include Princess Mitschenka, painter James Neeland, daughter of missionaries, Ruhannah Carew (known as Rue), singer Minna Minetta aka German spy Ilse Dumont, and Minna’s husband Eddie Brandes.  

Continue reading →

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “The Thing on the Doorstep”

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“The Thing on the Doorstep“, H. P. Lovecraft, 1937.

The Word War One content of this story is exactly the sort you would expect in a story set several years after the war and written by someone with adult memories of the war. The war years are just a casual background detail neither exotic or the focus of the story.

In the first part of the story, the narrator talks of his relationship with the doomed Edward Pickman Derby. The narrator, eight years older than his friend Derby, talks of his life when Derby is 25: “When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission but never got overseas.”

plattsburg-2
Are You Trained to Defend Your Country?, 1915

Of course, many people were rejected from military service on health grounds. Lovecraft himself tried to enlist, before the U.S. draft went into effect on May 18, 1917, into the Rhode Island National Guard. His mother and a family physician got him discharged on health reasons, not precisely detailed, shortly afterwards.

On a June 22, 1917 to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner, Lovecraft said,

I am feeling desolate and lonely indeed as a civilian. Practically all my personal acquaintances are now in some branch of the service, mostly Plattsburg or R.I.N.G. [Rhode Island National Guard]

According to Leslie S. Klinger’s annotation in The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, Camp Plattsburg (aka Camp Plattsburgh) was established in 1914 at Plattsburg, New York. It was part of a general movement to set up military training for volunteers after the Great War broke out .

plattsburg-poster
Are You Trained to Do Your Share?, 1915

The camp opened in the summer of 1915 with 1,200 trainees. At first it was known as the Business Men’s Camp (derogatively known as the Tired Businessmen’s Camp in the press). Some of its first graduates joined the Military Training Camps Association which lobbied Congress for government funding in 1917. After America entered the war, the civilian camp became an officers’ training camp.

Footage exists of the early days of the camp.

According to the figures I’ve seen about 3 million Americans were drafted in World War One. About 2.8 million were sent to France, so Lovecraft’s narrator is in the minority in not being deployed overseas.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: Yes.
  • On-Stage War: No.
  • Belligerent Area: No.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: No.

 

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World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “The Chameleon”

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“The Chameleon“, Frois Froisland, translated by Nils Flaten, 1930.

This is not the only doppelganger story in Froisland’s The Man with the X-ray Eyes & Other Stories from the Front. There is also “I Stood Looking at My Own Corpse”. It, however, is a completely naturalistic tale with no fantastic content. This is a more borderline case.

The story opens:

A man may have a double. As a rule, when we say that, we have two persons in mind. I have thought a little about this matter. I believe that a man may be his own double.

The chameleon in question is narrator Froisland’s friend and fellow journalist (and, seemingly, a lot of other things), Kinzo Yuratoku. Continue reading →

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “The Man with the X-ray Eyes”

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“The Man with the X-ray Eyes“, Frois Froisland, translated by Nils Flaten, 1930.

“The Man with the X-ray Eyes” is at once typical of the stories in Froisland’s The Man with the X-ray Eyes & Other Stories from the Front, a mixture of World War One history, travelogue, and fiction, and untypical.

Like nearly all the rest of the stories, framed by Froisland’s non-fiction descriptive pieces which open on the trench war and close with the triumphal march of Allied forces through Paris, it is an account of an individual’s psychological disintegration, a mystery never clearly explained because of the limited journalist perspective of narrator Froisland. But it is also the only story to be obviously fantastical and freighted with events that seem portentously symbolic. As the most unusual story in plot, theme, and title, it’s obvious why Froisland chose it for the name of his book. It is also the only story to dwell at length on physical injury, discomfort, and mutilation and to feature an American soldier.

Its weird fiction pedigree is signaled by the Poe-like beginning, so different from other story openings in the book:

Who has said that we must absolutely understand everything that happens in the world? We have perhaps, after all, not gotten beyond realizing that there are still things between heaven and earth which we simply must believe. Just believe — give up trying to reach bottom with our understanding. One may or may not believe the story about MacMurray, the corporal from Cincinnati — the man with the X-ray eyes.

The story begins, appropriately, at the Battle of the Saint-Mihiel Salient in France, the first independent action by American forces in the war. Coming under artillery fire outside the village of Hattonchatel, MacMurray’s squad hurriedly entrench. In the dark, a “huge German shell” strikes the ground behind the trench.

Explicitly inspired by the famous tranchee des baionnettes  at Verdun, Froisland buries the squad completely and fatally except for MacMurray and two others.

But, while they are not completely buried, they are not free. MacMurray is

“covered with earth, so that only the head and the left shoulder are free, the rest of the body forced into a twisted, unnatural, awful posture, with two meters of earth on top of him, legs forced apart and sprawling, the back in an awkward angle with the hips, the right arm broken and out of joint.

The night passes, the cries of all three heard only by themselves. The next day, Friday, September 13th, 1918, one of the men dies. The other man, Kentucky Jim, and MacMurray are mad with thirst and hunger.

Jim has freed his upper body, but it avails the two not. They are trapped. Rain pours down on them. They are unnoticed by gravediggers and corpsman passing them by.

Then, at some point after hours of unconsciousness and hallucination, MacMurray can see exactly what is in a knapsack within Jim’s arm’s reach. It has water, bread, wine, and a trench shovel. He yells at Jim to grab the bag. This goes on for a long time before Jim tells MacMurray to shut up, that he can’t possibly know what is in the knapsack.

Jim never does grab the bag, but, before the two are rescued, MacMurray knows of his new powers.

MacMurray is taken to the hospital. Gangrene has set in his two legs, and they are amputated. His eyes, his “double vision”, becomes the talk of the hospital. Tests are done. MacMurray can see through tissue dead and living, safes, and walls. The doctors laugh at first, but, three days later, he is an accepted and confirmed curiosity for patients and staff.

MacMurray can’t explain his power. It requires no great effort, no concentration, regular vision slips into x-ray vision by a thought. The resulting images are clear, sharp, not reversed like a mirror, and tinted in “wonderfully beautiful” colors. And they leave quickly. As MacMurray says, “Intuition I guess some people call the process; I should rather call it emulsion.”

The attention starts to tire MacMurray and so does the shifting between the two modes of vision.  He helps the hospital’s doctors diagnosis patients.

Scientists, “spiritualists, theosophists, and occultist” attempt to explain MacMurray’s power.

It’s here that Froisland seems to deviate from his usual historical detail with the mention of the Italian engineer Ulvi who used F-rays to destroy floating mines ten kilometers away in a test outside of the French port of Brest. In another test, he is said to have blown up the “dismantled British cruiser Terpischore” 20 kilometers away.

In fact, there was an engineer Ulvi, who eloped with an Italian admiral’s daughter, and did demonstrate such an alleged weapon for the Italian navy. However, British naval engineers from Portsmouth were, evidently, unconvinced. William J. Fanning’s Jr’s Death Rays and the Popular Media 1876-1939: A Study of Directed Energy Weapons in Fact, Fiction and Film provides additional details.

By way of Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in uranium, Froisland asks if MacMurray’s power might be due to some substance in the human body that can act like a “ray projector”.

That’s the rationalization of weirdness using newspaper stories and science. Froisland’s scaffolding to suspend disbelief also mentions all those occult notions, and I think it is those that give shape some of its mysteries.

It is proposed that MacMurray’s powers rest on a “spiritual, psychological-metaphysical basis”. He is a “supersensitive” to the vibrations of the universe. He has “cryptoscopy”, the ability to see hidden objects. MacMurray, it is said, is also a clairvoyant with vision into past and future.

And that escalation of reputed abilities seems to be verified by the conclusion of the story.

There is little hatred of Germans in Froisland’s book, but it shows ironically here.  MacMurray spends his days talking fondly of the Germans he knew in Cincinnati.

So he was pro-German. Well, he had certainly been nicely treated by his friends! If he lost his right arm, too — which seemed very probable — his friends would have <<reduced>> him to a trunk without limbs, a square-shaped monstrosity, with one arm for a handle, the wreck of a man, horrible to look upon and pitiful to think about.

But MacMurray also speaks of Jim five beds down. Jim seems to be on his way to full recovery. But MacMurray tells a surgeon Jim will die tomorrow. And so he does of an embolism.

MacMurray’s tranquility is replaced by a “perfect terror, of something that was about to happen to him”. He is only certain it is to be feared, not what it is. His x-ray vision is no longer limited to the range of the hospital. It goes much further. His mind turns to spiritual matters. He questions just how much forgiveness the Bible asks of Christians.

It is here the narrator directly inserts himself and speaks of his first meeting (he has gathered the rest of the story from others) with MacMurray on October 14, 1918.

MacMurray can now read minds. And he can now prophecy. When asked, at about 11:05 AM that day, when the war will end, MacMurray merely responds “ask me exactly four weeks from this very moment”. Four weeks is, in fact, Armistice Day: November 11, 1918.

At the end of October an unknown Red Cross sister shows up at the hospital and goes straight to his bed. With “a whimpering sound, as from a dying animal — a block of stone, as it were, rocking a little after an earthquake — and fluttering blue cloak covered them both” she collapses on his bed.

That scene is directly followed by an odd interlude about the “three wise apes” of see, hear, and speak no evil fame and how every cause of effect is preceded by thoughts, desires, and acts.

We then hear how the nurse, the Sister in Blue, has been wondering from hospital to hospital in the American sector after she arrived eight months ago from America. She may serve the other patients wells, but MacMurray doesn’t smile for her or anyone.

In the dark, she holds his remaining hand as he seems tortured by visions even the Sister in Blue knows nothing of. MacMurray’s body has suffered but “Thoughts may torture one worse than the most excruciating physical pain.” (Something of a theme for the fiction in this book.)

On the night before November 8th, 1918, MacMurray shouts “Now he comes!” He then gives a brief description of the Armistice negotiations that did start on November 8th.

The next day a soldier mutilated with a crushed pelvis and “vital organs torn” is put in the bed Jim died in. The soldier is his “old friend, Floyd Hill from Cincinnati” who he last saw 19 months ago. When the Sister in Blue sees Hill, and collapses in distress.

That night MacMurray dies but not before he has his bed pushed near Floyd’s and touches Floyd’s blanket to smooth it. Then:

He lay there white and still, just stared. His eyes did not dim, did not close. He lay as if he were looking into something.

No one knew when he died.

What was MacMurray’s final vision that terrified him? The wounding and likely death of his old friend because MacMurray’s own death does not frighten him? Something more general and apocalyptic like another war? 1930 seems early for that sentiment though French Marshall Ferdinand Foch famously remarked, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.”

And was the Sister in Blue not there for MacMurray but somehow anticipating Hill’s arrival? Did she know both Hill and MacMurray before the war? And was she somehow an acolyte or avatar for MacMurray?

Successful weird fiction often relies on unsolved questions, and this story succeeds on that ground and the poignancy of MacMurray’s fate.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: Yes.
  • On-Stage War: Yes.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: No.

 

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “Through the Furnace”

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“Through the Furnace”, R. Thurston Hopkins, 1916.

Like his “The De Gamelyn Traditions“, this story concludes with the presence of the Divine successfully rallying British troops on the battlefield.

The story begins with Hilaire O’Hagan, “an incorrigible rascal”, having a mystical vision of a monk who chides him for his immorality after stealing a woman’s briefcase. That night he dreams of the same monk and wakes to save his earlier victim from a house fire.

We next see O’Hagan in the trenches, where, after six months of fighting, he is starting to suffer battle fatigue.

He was no longer master of himself. He was afraid. Every man has the instinct that prompts fear, for upon that instinct the whole foundation of life-preservation is founded. But over and above this instinct, common to all of us, O’Hagan had imagination—the graphic, vivid imagination that always lurks in Irish blood. Is not the entire history of the Celt a rejection of the things of this world for the Shadow and the dream? Upon this basis of fear and imagination O’Hagan started to build, building and building until he had created a grand structure of blind terror which yielded a most exquisite torture to his mind.

Yet he goes over the top for yet another attack.

The stalled offensive, the artillery fire get to him. He runs away and takes refuge in a “little wrecked church”. There he encounters the monk of his vision who shows him a coffin where lies another Hilaire O’Hagan who died in 1696.

The monk is sympathetic, knows how tired O’Hagan is. But O’Hagan still has a remaining duty:

“Brother,” he said, in a moved voice. “You must go back and help your comrades. There is no peace for you yet. Yes, brother, I know it is written that we shall rest from our labours—but the beginning of our rest is not yet. We must go and help them in the firing line yonder——”

“No, no, holy man!” O’Hagan pleaded. “I have had enough…. There is hell over there.”

“They are calling us, don’t you hear them—the living and the dead——”

As with “The De Gamelyn Traditions”, Hopkins story cites duty to not only comrades but the past as a reason to continue the struggle.

The “deserter O’Hagan” shows up while the Germans are assaulting the British lines, seemingly at the Second Battle of Ypres.

A tall man in a priest’s cassock, wielding a flaming sword, appears on the battlefield. Beside him is O’Hagan “holding a massive brass altar cross above his head”. O’Hagan hacks and stabs with the cross, drives the Germans back. It is the Angel of Mons vision all over again:

Men who watched him said he ran amok. His great voice rose high above the chattering machine guns in a beautiful Franciscan chant and the voice of the priest joined in. What O’Hagan, bearing his mighty cross, must have looked like in the eerie dawn mist, Heaven knows. But seeing such an apparition and hearing the strange chant, it is possible the Huns thought the devil had joined in the fight. Then a man in the rear trench pointed to the west, where a great image of the cross was shining against a blood red sky, and a voice cried “Forward.” It passed from man to man, and the regiment advanced, howling, with O’Hagan. They drove the Germans before them like chaff before a fan, and fell back, in triumph, to their lost trenches.

The story ends with O’Hagan seemingly buried beside the coffin of his ancestor, the monk of the vision blessing his grave.

The story has the tone of sincere devout Christianity and not just the use of Christian imagery and ideas in its plot. It reminds us how much religious motivations shored up many of the Great War’s soldiers.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: Yes.
  • On-Stage War: Yes.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: Yes — probably.

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “The De Gamelyn Traditions”

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“The De Gamelyn Traditions“, R. Thurston Hopkins, 1916.

Those who eagerly read fiction when young sometimes have to learn that life does not imitate art.

That is the problem of this story’s protagonist, Tim Gamelyn.

The Viktor of the “old book” Viktor the Valiant is Tim’s hero. Unlike Viktor, Tim has an unheroic nickname, “Carrots”, on account of his red hair. His efforts to imitate Viktor fail. His soccer debut is unremarkable. His attempt to stop another boy from abusing a dog is not only unsuccessful but uncalled for.

Tim begins to think Viktor is “a bit of a prig—also a fraud.” The book is traded in for two oranges and a slingshot.

Two years go by. Tim gets better in sports, runs afoul of the school’s headmaster, and, though never destined to become a great soldier or sailor, becomes a lively enough part of Thetford Grammar School that, when he leaves, the place seems “flat and spiritless”.

But there is another tradition, another set of stories, another code of conduct he does not abandon.

Tim is the son of Old Sergeant Gamelyn of whom it is said, “what old Gamelyn didn’t know about soldiering weren’t worth knowin'”. The Gamelyns have been soldiers for centuries.

Tim has read the “forgotten drill and manual exercises, the uncomfortable and graceless manœuvres of the rigid but redoubtable men who fought at Waterloo”. He’s seen the “pictures in colour of warriors in three-cornered hats, high stocks and powdered wigs” He knows “by heart the quaint words of command in which Wellington’s men were told to charge a musket with powder and ball”.

So, it’s not surprising that in August 1914, Tim answers the call to duty.

And it is there, when the reality of the Great War meets the memories and practices of history, that the story gets interesting and shows the reality that the armies of Europe had to adjust to.

The modern rifle would not allow men to march into battle with colours flying and bands playing: the old brave way was impossible in the face of machine guns. The pomp and pageantry of battle had departed and there was nothing left but for the attacking party to crawl in a most inelegant fashion upon the ground.

“Down!” cried the sergeant-instructor to poor Tim, who started his lessons in field training with some vague idea about marching on the foe with “head and eyes erect” and with “pace unfaltering and slow.” “When you get out to Flanders you will have to get right down on your belly if you want to live a little longer than ten minutes. Extend to five-six-ten paces and get as close to old mother earth as possible and hide your bloomin’ selves!”

“Hide yourselves!” thought Tim. “Not thus is it written in my father’s book of drill! It plainly said therein that the duty of a soldier was to learn how to die, not to hide from death.”

Eventually Tim and his company make it to the “long dull plains of Northern Europe” and see battle.

Oddly, trenches are not mentioned when Tim makes his acquaintance with 20th century warfare.

From the right came a curious gasping choke, and looking, he saw the man next to him throw up his arms and pitch forward on his face. Suddenly he became aware of a peculiar wailing above him, as if the air itself was in torture. Again a long line of fire flashed out ahead of him and again came the wailing sound. A Boche machine-gun loosed a few belts of cartridges in the spasmodic style of her kind. There was no mistake about it this time—massed infantry were sweeping the plain with rifle fire, and the quick-firers were feeling for an opening.

Another man was hit—close to Tim. He squealed like a girl; and a fellow near turned a dirty white, stumbled, with a clatter fell in a fainting fit. Tardily the men advanced, and any acute observer would have seen they had little heart in the business. Some hung behind almost unconsciously, and had to be hurried up by the sergeants. The bullets became more thick. A man started to blubber behind. “Gawd ‘ave mercy! I … I can’t stand it! I won’t go on!” he whined. It turned out to be a sergeant, who had broken down too. He’d had little rest, poor chap, through shepherding his company … and now he had knocked under. The company swayed and hesitated. Some of them faced round. It was touch and go. “Steady there! Steady! Come on, men;” said Stansfield, the little company lieutenant, as the men wavered on the grey edge of collapse. “Steady that company; what in hell’s the matter with ’em. Keep your men up and going, Sir!” shouted a captain rushing over. But the company had gone all to pieces. The fire of battle had departed from them, and it flung itself on the ground. And soon the whole battalion was taking cover in the same way. A captain called on Tim’s company to advance. Two men obeyed and one of them was Tim. But the enemy’s fire redoubled and the other man was shot, and so Tim at once took cover again. The saying of his sergeant-instructor in England came to his mind, that a man must lie down and hide if he wished to live, and he felt quite justified in hugging the earth.

It is then that Arthur Machen’s “The Bowmen” enters the picture or at least its central image.

Tim sees a man appear before him, his expression “lofty and noble”. The man chides him, mocks him for not upholding the De Gamelyn traditions. The figure taps his “shoulder with a barbed shaft trimmed with grey goose feather”. He also hands Tim the Sword of Life and Death.

Wielding the fiery sword, Tim rallies the company. The shade of Nigel De Gamelyn summons “the armies of the unconquered dead”.

The company is triumphant, but Tim dies from a bayonet wound possibly that “barbed shaft” Nigel taps him with. (I don’t think we are to think Nigel kills Tim, just that he is present at Tim’s death.)

The Sword of Life and Death is revealed to be just a rusty old sword hundreds of years old. But the flaming sword is a real miracle and observed by many. It is Hopkins continuing the tradition of Machen’s story and fictionalizing the miraculous stories Forbes Phillips mentions in the introduction to the volume this story first appeared in, War and the Weird.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: Yes.
  • On-Stage War: Yes.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: Yes — probably.

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “Ombos”

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“Ombos“, R. Thurston Hopkins, 1916.

When this story was written, the Great War was just part of the contemporary background. It is a fairly standard occult tale about a man infusing his soul into a bronze statue of medieval occult scholar Albert Magnus. Murder and mystery ensue. The Great War just happens to be the setting for part of it.

The war shows up mostly in the middle of the story when Captain Crabbe relates how, in June 1915 near Ypres, he meets the titular Ombos, the man with the statue, for the first time. Ombos runs an antique shop, and Crabbe learns of his plans and briefly meets Ombos’ niece Margot.

He visits the shop one more time before Ombos dies and once afterward. He suddenly becomes romantically interested in Margot (the story ends with their marriage) and makes arrangements to have her placed in his home along with the statue after Ombos’ death.

Crabbe is wounded, returned to his home, where the presence of the statue disturbs him. A couple of murders take place and the wonder of Ombos’ success is revealed.

The day after Crabbe leaves the antique shop the second time, German artillery, with its “Coal Boxes” and “Jack Johnsons”, turns the town into “a heap of senseless wreckage”.  (“Coal boxes” are supposedly shell bursts producing black smoke as are “Jack Johnsons.”)

Crabbe says he’s gone for a month before returning to Ypres which confuses the story’s chronology. He says he’s been in France since the beginning of the war, August 1914, and clearly states he arrived in the town around June. The Second Battle of Ypres officially ended May 25, 1915. The book was published in 1916 before the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) which started July 31, 1917. Crabbe may be referring to some small action not large enough to constitute an official battle.

Crabbe vividly describes the ruined Ypres he sees on his return:

“Men, children and horses were lying dead in every gutter.

“In due course I arrived at the shop. A large hole had been ripped in the pavé road before the door, and I had to step over a dead and twisted soldier to gain an entrance. … Silence—only the faint boom of a gun far away in the French trenches—awful, ghastly silence. Then a deafening roar and a falling of masonry as Krupp’s marked down another house in the town of sorrow. The horror of it!

“I turned dismally away, out into the Rue Bar-le-Duc, and along the square. A few scattered lights shone feebly through the evening mist, and over towards the Norman bridge the yellow flames from a burning house lit up the sky with a lurid glow. At nearly every street corner little groups of civilians had collected and were talking and gesticulating in a terrified manner. When a big shell came with a hoarse, rattling noise through the air, like a racing motor cycle on the track at Brooklands, they would rush into their homes, panic-smitten. If death winked, and passed them over, out they would creep again. And so they lived in an inferno of shells for weeks on end.

“An ambulance wagon overturned in the middle of the road attracted my attention. I could not repress a shudder as I looked on the shell-shattered wreck…. It was the old type of four-horse ambulance used by the army in South Africa; possibly it had jolted into the shell-swept death-trap of Spion Kop, or carried men into the reeking enteric camps of Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun.”

Crabbe, with the help of a British military policeman, a so-called Red Cap, saves Margot from a “rough”, and he arranges, with the help of the British Ambulance Service Corps (tellingly only identified as “A.S.C.”).

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: Yes.
  • On-Stage War: Yes.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: Yes — probably.

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “One Man’s War”

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“One Man’s War“, G. L. Lathian, 2014.

It doesn’t take long, in this story, to find out it takes place in a secret history or alternate history.

We hear, as a woman interviews one Lutz Bergmann, that the “real Adolf Hitler” died in an asylum years ago. It wasn’t the death Bergmann planned when he shot Hitler in the back of the head all those years ago.

Off the record, Bergmann reveals his final secret, the one regret of his life.

His story goes back to October 1914. Bergmann meets Hitler in the enlistment line, seemingly for Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment 16 which is where he served in our timeline. The two become fast friends. They even look alike. And Hitler is easy to like.

In battle, a “bond forged in blood” forms between the two. Both are aggressive and ambitious. But Hitler is more – observant, on the make, constantly observing and theorizing about human behavior. Hitler even runs an experiment on his theory of the “big lie” and convinces a private his perfectly normal dentition is off-center.

Hitler, says Bergmann, was a genius, his casual remarks set Bergmann thinking about them for hours. Both are German nationalists though neither are German. Bergmann was born in South Africa. Hitler is, of course, Austrian. Both think “We’re run by rich politicians that claim we all live equally, yet are they down here on the frontlines, shovels in hand, digging in for the night with the rest of us?”

There, the similarity ends. Bergmann identifies Jews as those rich politicians. Hitler does not.

The two are separated when Hitler is reassigned to the regimental staff. Years later, though, they are reunited when both are wounded and sent to the hospital.

Hitler doubts the cause they fight for: “We fight for nothing and for that reason we’ll lose this war. … Will duty be enough to win this war?”

In the days of their recovery, they play chess, discuss the great men of history – Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, “men that would be remembered by ink and memory long after their bones turned to dust”.

One day, unable to resist the allure of Hitler’s most private thoughts, Bergmann sneaks a look at Hitler’s diary.

Hitler, he finds out, thinks his constant ranting about Jews makes him uneasy about his relationship with Bergmann.

The two separate again and, when on leave with some other soldiers in Munich, Bergmann decides to do what Hitler will not: put his theories into practice. He leads some other soldiers in beating a Jew.

In his first unequivocal evasion, Bergmann claims the beating only broke some ribs, blackened an eye. Actually, the Jew died.

Bergmann and Hitler are reunited one last time “in Cormines” (I haven’t been able to find out if that’s a real place). Hitler, a corporal, takes charge of a unit as the highest ranking officer. Before the two make one last charge, they have an uneasy exchange.

Talking about their plans after the war, Hitler frankly disagrees when Bergmann says he sees Hitler ruling men after the war,

“My ideas aren’t right for this time.”

… “I believe they are. Perhaps you’re just not the right man for the moment.”

… “Lutz, war has changed you … Or maybe I have.”

As Hitler goes over the top, Bergmann stays behind, shoots Hitler, and leaves him for dead.

It’s at this point that the tension and curiosity of the story evaporate when the authors (G. L. Lathian is actually Garret Streater and Luke Jessop) release the conceptual bonds. What could have become an interesting alternate or secret history fizzes.

We learn no consequential details about Bergmann’s reign — only that he seems to have been a leader, “a man whose legacy can be seen by the millions of crosses and unmarked graves scattered across the world.” And then we get a predictable revelation — Bergmann hates Jews out of a loathing of his own Jewishness.

Certainly the chaos hinted at by Bergmann’s killing a Jew in Munich around the end of the war is congruent with the social unrest, the riots and mutinies, that were convulsing the last days of the German Empire. The main attraction though is not World War One but Hitler the man.

The socialist ideas he hints at were part of Hitler’s thoughts. Are the authors implying, or at least making us consider, that things might have been better for Germany if Hitler’s style socialism minus the anti-Semitism would have replaced the German Empire?

And who is Bergmann’s interrogator? This timeline’s version of a Nuremburg prosecutor? A psychologist?

More of a starting point for a longer work than a satisfying story.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: No.
  • On-Stage War: Yes.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: No.

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.

 

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: “Dagon”

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“Dagon”, H. P. Lovecraft, 1923.

The publication date of this story is 1923, but it was actually written in the summer of 1917.

Its World War One content is pretty minimal and mostly is there to set up the story of a man, adrift in the Pacific, coming across the survival of a horrible alien race on a newly upraised island. He eventually makes his way back to San Francisco to become a morphine addict to forget what he has seen. At story’s end, he kills himself after seeing (or hallucinating, depending on your reading) that one of the horrible creatures he saw has followed him back to civilization.

The story is set in the early days of the war:

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners.

I read this story out of Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft. One of his annotations implies the above places the story before either October 20, 1914’s sinking of the SS Glitra, a merchant vessel or February 4, 1915 when Kaiser Wilhelm permitted merchant vessels to be sunk by German U-boats in the area around England and Ireland. There are other possible dates for Germany sinking to its “later degradation”: February 18, 1915’s announcement by Germany that it would attack vessels of nations trading with Britain or May 7, 1915’s sinking of the Lusitania.

The German sea-raider Wolf operated in the Pacific as late as August 1917, so Lovecraft’s background history is plausible.

But the most interesting aspect of World War One’s treatment is that, like Edgar Rice Burroughs in Beyond Thirty, Lovecraft portrays the war as weakening human civilization to the point where something else may kill it:

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind — of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

Writing in 1917, the creatures on Lovecraft’s island are not metaphors for the coming scourges of fascism or communism or the Spanish flu. Lovecraft’s creatures may be metaphors but not for those post-war horrors.

Of course, Burroughs’ horrors were unlikely but more plausible than Lovecraft’s, but both were responding to contemporary anxieties.

World War One Content

  • Living Memory: Yes.
  • On-Stage War: No.
  • Belligerent Area: Yes.
  • Home Front: Yes.
  • Veteran: No.

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction