WWI Veteran

World War One in Fantastic Fiction: The Frenetic People

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My look at pre-World War II apocalyptic romans scientifique continues.

Essay: The Frenetic People, Ernest Pérochon, trans. Brian Stableford, 2012.

Cover by Yoz

The effects of World War One on literature are vast but usually hidden behind metaphors, displaced into other settings. This series is about the overt use of World War One in fantastic fiction. Pérochon’s novel uses the war in both ways.

Born in 1885, Pérochon saw combat, briefly, in the war. He was conscripted and went to the front but suffered a heart attack there in 1914 and was discharged. Another heart attack would eventually kill him in 1942 but not before he saw more horrors of the twentieth century. He ran afoul of the Vichy government. His only child and her husband joined the French Resistance, but she was imprisoned in Buchenwald though she escaped.

Pérochon was not one of those authors who routinely wrote science fiction. This was his sole venture into the genre. His usual stories were about the French poor working the land.

Stableford’s “Introduction” notes that the inter-war years saw no shortage in either Britain or France of stories about civilization destroyed in a future war. It seemed entirely plausible that the next war would see chemical, biological, and even atomic weapons delivered to cities via aerial bombardment. These stories tended to be more extreme in French romans scientifique. The Great War had, of course, been fought on French soil. Those French works tended to displace their future war stories more in time than British scientific romances did.

Published in 1925 as Les Hommes frénétiques, Stableford contends this novel doesn’t quite match the “sheer brutality of its excess” of José Moselli’s Illa’s End, also from 1925. However,

its far greater sophistication and mock-laconic attention to detail renders its account of superscientific warfare even more effective in its horror.

Having read both novels, I agree.

Our story opens at the Avernine Institute in the fifth century of the Universal Era. Avernine is a great scientist whose work resulted in an energy grid, using the ether, that extends around the world, a work so important that the time is called the Age of Avernine.

Continue reading →

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: “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 Mills of God”

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“The Mills of God“, R. Thurston Hopkins, 1916.

This story takes place entirely on the Western Front after the trenches have been dug.

It is short tale of divine vengeance for the murder of a small French boy, Bodru. He is a favorite of some British troops. The village he lives in is in a contested area of the front, and the story opens with the British deciding to retreat from the area since it “was full of spies”.

A few weeks after the British retreat, a German soldier enters the home of Bodru and his mother. He is seemingly a deserter given “There was no sign of cap-badge or title on his shoulder straps, and he was horribly dirty.”

Soon he’s drunk on a bottle of confiscated Benedictine and has an argument with Bodru who mocks him. “I think you may be like the man in the English soldiers’ story, who turned into a pig—a baby killer perhaps.”

Bodru gets bayoneted and his body concealed in the attic.

As his mother frantically seeks Bodru and the German soldier is still in the house, the British soldiers return. They notice blood on the German’s sleeve.

At that moment, a shell strikes the roof, and Bodru’s body falls from its concealment in the attic. The German soldier flees and is shot.

The convenient results of artillery fire, shelling as a revelation of a miracle, calls to mind the alleged miracle of crucifixes surviving the destruction of churches that vicar Forbes Phillips talks about in his introduction to the work, War and the Weird, where this story first appeared.

What isn’t here is any real mention of organized German atrocities, the so-called “Rape of Belgium”, that helped sustain the war effort in Britain. Calling the German “baby killer” is about the closest the story gets, but he isn’t acting in concert with other Germans.

German atrocities in Belgium were real as discussed in a recent BBC broadcast, “The Great War of Words, Episode 1”. It became fashionable in the late 1920s, particularly with Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That, to argue that they never happened. But German records document thousands of Belgiums, including children, being executed by the forces of Imperial Germany. Some may have been justifiable as being conducted against partisans not in uniform and beyond the Geneva Convention’s protection, but there is no doubt Germany’s behavior in Belgium, apart from the very act of invading a neutral country and unrestricted submarine warfare, did it no favors.

The Kaiser didn’t help either when, during the Boxer Rebellion, he was the one who dubbed the German Army “Huns”

So, it is a bit surprising in a tale where divine intervention avenges a German atrocity, that Hopkins gives us a small scale story that only very slightly touches on what was such an emotional motive for Britain to fight the Great War.

World War One Content

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

More World War One in Fantastic Fiction.