Must Read Classic: Wilhelm Lamszus

Wilhelm Lamszus was the visionary who wrote the most realistic description of World War I two years before it started. He also managed to do this without any hero clap trap and emotional arms selling. He stuck to the bloody, gory details he foresaw so correctly. It's no wonder Hollywood never wanted to do the movie.

In “The Human Slaughterhouse,” Wilhelm Lamszus told the fate of a young family man and father enthusiastically marching to the fields of promised glory. The war would be waged against Germany’s hereditary enemy France. With uplifting and stirring martial music, he and his comrades are sent off to fight for king and country, or more correctly Emperor and German Empire. Prior to the cattle like transport to the front, the soldiers attend mass. It is held solely to consecrate their weapons of slaughter in church. In the name of God the Merciful, "He blessed our guns, that their expensive balls may make it count, that they may not get lost blown into empty air, that every precious cartridge may hit a hundred people and tear them to pieces all at once."

The protagonist of the novel is left nameless by Wilhelm Lamszus. Another prophetic twist, as we all know the graves of unknown soldiers just too well. At the front, he arrives after long marches through blood and iron and for the first time is confronted with death: "A cold fist touched us on scared hearts."

This darkly poetic style doesn't last much further into the novel. Modern war knows no poetry, only destruction. "We timidly peep out over the mounds. Has red hell opened? It screams and shrills and brings forth wild and boundless yells so unnatural that we huddle closer to each other ... and trembling, we see our faces and our uniforms were red with wet spots, and clearly visible we had meat pieces on our stuff," The soldier discovered "something white" on the dark sand: "a nameless torn off hand ... and there ... and there ... pieces of meat still attached to bits of uniform - and we recognize it, and horror descends on us: Out there are arms, legs, heads, torsos ... they howl into the night, the whole regiment is there torn to pieces, a lump of human flesh that cries to heaven ..." In the end, the protagonist also dies and is dumped into a mass grave. Nameless.

Wilhelm Lamszus uses language that points forward in its insistence to the great adventure novels of the post World War I period: to Henri Barbusse’s “Fire”, to Arnold Zweig’s “Case of Sergeant Grisha” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” as well as to Gabriel Chevallier’s “Fear”. Despite it all, in Wilhelm Lamszus' novel there is still hope left that it would be possible to avert the great disaster and to prevent the war.

For anyone thinking that war is something heroic, this book is a must read. And it should be on every school curriculum all over the world. The harmless little weapons of the World War I have long since been put to the museum and have been replaced by really destructive weaponry. In that sense, the book only heightens in horror if you look at it in its historical connotation.

Further reading
Evacuation From Yalta 1919
Lost and Found: Britannic's Lost Organ
Surviving Shipwreck Three Times