"the sole internationalism—if it existed—had been that of deserters"

October 30, 2016 6:48 PM

The ghouls of No Man's Land James Deutsch explores an urban legend from the First World War, and its decades-long afterlife. (SLSmithsonian)
posted by doctornemo (22 comments total)

What has always struck me about photographs of the battlefields of WWI is how difficult it is to imagine they had ever been, or could ever be, anything else. Were they farms, or forests, or what? Of course they had been, and no doubt are again, but they really did become, as Owen said, a kind of moon, full of nothing but soldiers and their orders - orders to come, orders to go, orders to live and orders to die. Naturally there were stories about those who could live without orders.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:14 PM on October 30, 2016 [6 favorites]

Just when you think the trenches of WWI couldn't be more horrifying....
posted by rtha at 7:20 PM on October 30, 2016

I was just reading about this on *cough*cracked.com*cough*. Really interesting stuff.
posted by Literaryhero at 7:25 PM on October 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Having once written a paper on propaganda and urban legendry of WW1, I can say there's some gruesome ones. Not just the ghouls. There's also the rat army (giant carpets of corpse-eating rats), the corpse factory (Germans processing the dead into glycerine and soap), the Caporetti (frozen Italian and Austrian soldiers trapped in crevasses, perfectly preserved for their discovery in 1918/ onwards), and the limb thieves (an urban legend of evil German experimentation on harvesting limbs from allied POWs to restore amputee German soldiers).

The actual horrors of the Western Front were not enough, they needed to make new ones up to keep the home front enraged and motivated.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 7:35 PM on October 30, 2016 [9 favorites]

When I think of the horrors of the Western Front, one image that leaps to mind is Georges Paul Leroux's L'Enfer. The painting depicts No Man's Land during the siege of Verdun. If you're ever in the Imperial War Museum in London, you should go see it. It is truly staggering.
posted by dazed_one at 7:45 PM on October 30, 2016 [4 favorites]

Here is the IWM page for the painting, providing some additional information.
posted by dazed_one at 7:48 PM on October 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Of course they had been, and no doubt are again

They really aren't.
posted by stevis23 at 8:10 PM on October 30, 2016 [13 favorites]

Roger Waters - The Ballad of Bill Hubbard - World War One - Alf Razzel's story
posted by parm=serial at 9:14 PM on October 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's just a legend, but it sounds plausible. So much more believable than the reality that millions of men kept charging into battle and dying, over and over, for years. We'd like to believe that some of those men said "no I won't be a robot," and tried to survive on their own beyond the discipline of their armies, if only because that would confirm our beliefs about human nature. But if there were any successful deserters (as opposed to the ones who were executed), why didn't we hear at least some of their stories over the last hundred years? The fact that no one has ever admitted to being part of one of these underground communities is the strongest evidence that they never existed.
posted by Kevin Street at 9:19 PM on October 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

The actual horrors of the Western Front were not enough, they needed to make new ones up to keep the home front enraged and motivated.

Which is one of the reasons that Allied citizens didn't take rumors of the Holocaust too seriously 25 years later...
posted by Hatashran at 9:30 PM on October 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

> They really aren't.

I had no idea that so much of the Verdun was still closed to human habitation.

But I shouldn't be surprised, I guess. I was still living in DC when a construction crew dug up some mortar rounds in a fancy neighborhood in upper NW. During WWI, there was an experimental weapons lab at AU, and when it was shut down, they just buried things in pits and didn't record what went where. That's resulted in "one of the country’s costliest military-debris removal projects", with contaminated soil and an apparently endless amount of unexploded ordnance that keeps getting dug up, including gas shells.
posted by rtha at 9:32 PM on October 30, 2016 [7 favorites]

It sounds like these deserters, weary of abuse from the nations they fought for, rejected those tribal identities and sought to build a world in which soldiers will always have a place, an Outer Heaven.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:51 AM on October 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you want to get a sense of the landscape I highly recommend the recent BBC series, The Somme 1916 - From Both Sides of the Wire (clip). The presenter walks the battle sites and you get a feeling for the woods, hills, and farms that so many people fought and died over.
posted by crocomancer at 5:44 AM on October 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

It sounds a little like the old Icelandic folk tales about there being communities of outlaws in the country's inhospitable interior (to which those sentenced to outlawry in the Middle Ages were exiled, presumably to die).
posted by acb at 5:57 AM on October 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

What has always struck me about photographs of the battlefields of WWI is how difficult it is to imagine they had ever been, or could ever be, anything else. Were they farms, or forests, or what? Of course they had been, and no doubt are again, but they really did become, as Owen said, a kind of moon, full of nothing but soldiers and their orders - orders to come, orders to go, orders to live and orders to die.

In a lot of sectors, absolutely—and certainly around Ypres, because of the drainage situation. But there were other sectors where the trenches were surrounded by wildflowers and no mans land was full of tall grass and the soldiers wrote home talking about the song birds they'd heard and the animals they'd spotted. If you go through British periodicals for the war period, you'll find articles written by officers talking about the wildlife of the trenches. John Lewis-Stempel's got a book on all this coming out next week.
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:07 AM on October 31, 2016 [5 favorites]

(an urban legend of evil German experimentation on harvesting limbs from allied POWs to restore amputee German soldiers)

I think that was just Herbert West's cover story.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:25 AM on October 31, 2016 [2 favorites]

I wonder if this inspired Lovecraft's ghouls. Some googling reveals that there are a few Lovecraft tales explicitly inspired by the trenches, but Ghouls don't seem to be (officially) among them.
posted by Myca at 7:54 AM on October 31, 2016

Reminds me of the movie Deathwatch (haunted WWI trenches).
posted by gottabefunky at 9:49 AM on October 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

Another scary thing from Fusell's WWI book was a quote from Sigfried Sassoon about how some soldiers had come to believe that the war would literally continue forever, as if they were already dead and in Hell.
posted by thelonius at 10:20 AM on October 31, 2016 [3 favorites]

There's a section in Kim Newman's vampires-in-WWI novel The Bloody Red Baron about a group of deserters living and scavenging in No Man's Land. It sounds just like this and now I don't know if it came from research or from imagination.
posted by cadge at 1:30 PM on October 31, 2016

I'm going to plug Pat Barker here. Stunningly researched and fully imagined, but no vampires. It's worse.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 1:43 PM on October 31, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder if this inspired Lovecraft's ghouls. Some googling reveals that there are a few Lovecraft tales explicitly inspired by the trenches, but Ghouls don't seem to be (officially) among them.

I wouldn't be surprised if No Man's Land was (at least partially) Tolkien's inspiration for Mordor. World War I looms large in the twentieth century's creative imagination, despite the fact that it was overshadowed twenty years later.
posted by Vic Morrow's Personal Vietnam at 5:35 PM on October 31, 2016