Welcome to the inaugural feature of By Any Other Name, a column dedicated to horror outside the traditional definitions of the genre. So, while the rest of the intrepid crew of Captain Greg's fine vessel the USS Fearzone will be dealing out their steady hands of horror goodness, I'm going on a stealth mission to find horror where you might least suspect it.

And who am I?

Jason S. Ridler, freshly minted Ph.D. in War Studies, former cemetery groundskeeper, and writer. My fiction has appeared in The Back Alley, Nossa Morte and Dark Recesses, among other fine establishments, and my non-fiction has been published at Clarkesworld, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, and Dark Scribe (forthcoming).

Over the next few months, I'm going to be posting about where you can get a horror fix away from your usual drop spots. Novels, stories, comics, and movies that does what the best horror work does, even if there is no glowing skull on the spine.

So, for the first shot here at BAON, where better to start than the nightmare world of 1914, and the birth of total warfare in Europe. Because if war ain't nothing but horror misspelled, I do not know what is. Next time, we look at the conflict that erupted after The War to End All Wars.

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WAR OF HORROR: THE HORROR OF WAR

Much of the literature of the World Wars is horror without the label, though it may seem strange to consider it as such. After all, most horror novels are constructed tales that bend the rules of reality to serve their story's purpose. Veterans wrote the majority of 20th century war literature to make sense of their actual experiences.

But the experience of total war in the twentieth century was so fantastic in size, scope, and cost that most of these writers produced horror literature that engages the man made hell of combat and the desolate environment of war. Here we look at some literature from The Great War (1914-1918) to its awful sequel (1939-1945), where soldiers turned the near-fantastic experience of modern war in the industrial age into experiential documents of human valour and tragedy.


PART I: THE TROGLODYTE WORLD OF THE GREAT WAR

The foot soldier of the Great War experienced a landscape made by industrial weaponry, whose teeth cut through Europe from Belgium to Switzerland. Machine-gun fire filled the battlefield with zones of death, so armies dug in and lived underground in ever expanding trenches filled with rats, lice, and disease. Artillery barrages turned the French and Belgian countryside into a pockmarked lunar landscape. Poison gas clouded horizons and marched with the wind in eerie, deadly gusts. Barbed wire filled the space between trenches, ensuring the living to join the dead. The horror of war, or war of horror?

Second World War veteran and historian Paul Fussell defined this landscape of the Western Front as the "Troglodyte World." All the norms of civilian were transformed by the inhospitable realities of war. Soldiers became nocturnal, daylight being an enemy of survival. Fragmented corpses hung from trees, in sandbags, and scattered throughout No Man's Land, where hundreds of miles of barbed wire waited to bite flesh and clothing long enough for a sniper to leave one hanging like a scarecrow. Raw courage expressed itself in the Hemingway tradition of grace under fire on countless occasions, but it also depleted rapidly as survival seemed more and more a game of chance, and was replaced by fatalism, dull acceptance, cowardice, and insanity.

The major novels of the Great War are about survival in this hell. The protagonist of All Quiet on the Western Front finds himself in a graveyard firefight, with stacked corpses and coffins, devoid of sanctity, providing cover. Fredrick Manning's Her Private's We has the soldier Bourne complain about the impersonal enemy whose machines tried to kill him. Storming into the nightmare realm of No Man's Land was to enter the unreal, a space devoid of beginning or ending. The perpetual present of combat. As Bourne put it,

One had lived instantaneously during that time-less interval, for in the shock and violence of the attack, the perilous instant, on which he stood perched so precariously, was all that the half stunned man could grasp; and, if he lost his grip on it, he fell back among the grotesque terrors and nightmare creatures of his own mind.

In these conditions, the supernatural bred like lice in soldiers' minds. The "Angel of Mons," the ghostly archer of Agincourt who saved the British from defeat in 1915, was held by some Brits as gospel truth (and may have been rooted in Arthur Machen's war story The Bowman of September 1915). But most soldiers reconstructed the man made horrors surrounding them into myths of the battlefield.

Rumours of German inhumanity abounded in the West. In one instance, word spread of a crucified Canadian, his hands and feet nailed with bayonets in front of his mates outside Ypres. Then there was the tale of the lost battalion, a group of soldiers from each side, French, German, British, Austrian, Belgian, even Russian, who had given up fighting the war, banded together, and lived in No Man's Land, waiting out the war as cannibals in underground caverns. But no story reflected this war of blood and iron more than that of the Tallow Machine. As the war dragged on, industrial war supplies diminished rapidly. The allied soldiers heard whispers that the Germans were rendering their dead in an industrial factory to create war materials such as axle grease for artillery pieces: even the dead fed the war machine. These stories have never been confirmed, but they were believed well enough by the inhabitants of the Troglodyte world.

TO BE CONTINUED