World War I deserves our attention. The hectic, violent years from 1914 to 1918 set the stage for the rest of the tumultuous twentieth century and laid the groundwork for the modern world.
I spent years working on The Warm Hands of Ghosts. Over those years, many people asked me to describe the time and place that was taking up so much of my imagination, and the descriptor I found myself using over and over, sometimes humorously, sometimes seriously, was steampunk. The years of World War I were as close to a moment of historical science fiction as we will ever get: an indescribable mash-up of changing mores and technologies. And its participants, like time travelers, were people of one era flung without warning into another.
It was a time of shocking juxtapositions. Artillery could kill from seventy-five miles away, yet armies still communicated via messenger pigeon. Suits of armor went up against machine guns. Cavalry charged at tanks. Combat nurses wore corsets and carried gas masks. Primitive handto-hand combat with bayonets and trench knives alternated with precisely calibrated artillery barrages, and, famously, generals ran the war from luxurious French chΓ’teaux while their men, a scant few miles away, slept in wet, corpse-ridden trenches.
These contrasts are what initially drew me in. They give the war a hint of the fantastic, or at least of the darkly surreal. Some of the most indelible literary images to come out of the war did not find expression in historical tomes or works of realistic fiction but rather crept their way into fantasy and horror: The 1938 French war film Jβaccuse! has the mutilated bodies of the dead rise and come shambling out of No Manβs Land, a clear precursor to the modern zombie film. More famously, in The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien based his descriptions of Mordor and its neighboring lands on his wartime experiences. The unforgettable descriptions of Frodo and Sam crossing an alien landscape of slag heaps and smoking pits, with any water they can find burning their mouthsβTolkien didnβt imagine that. He lived it.
It is perhaps not surprising that a substantial part of the Great Warβs cultural influence was filtered through fantasy. It was a time so rawly traumatic that its survivors barely had language to describe it. Millions disappeared. Millions died. Millions more went home maimed. Huge swaths of France and Belgium were annihilated under tens of millions of shells. And in 1918 a flu pandemic swept the globe, killing more millions, often quickly and gruesomely.
Europeans in 1914, rich with plundered colonial wealth, believing wholly in their cultural supremacy, discovered that they were capable of sending their children off to live in holes and murder each other. That knowledge stayed with the survivors all their lives.
The break with the past was so sudden and so traumatic that many writers have framed the war in apocalyptic terms. A 2014 French documentary about the war is called, simply, Apocalypse. Dan Carlin called his WWI podcast series Blueprint for Armageddon. A 1916 Spanish novel about the war is titled The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is not surprising. The Western concept of the end of days is shaped by the biblical Book of Revelation, and it is not difficult to map imagery from those pages βplague, war, famine, death, the sun turned black, a rain of fire, the martyrs crying outβonto the war years.
I, too, considered the war through an apocalyptic lens, and in doing so I kept returning to this biblical quote: βAnd I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.β
The question I would have asked this long-ago prophet is: βDid you see a new hell too?β
Hellscapes are a feature of the Western literary tradition, from Odysseusβs trip to the underworld to Danteβs nine circles to the golden city of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost. But the twentieth century provided us with earthly hellscapes: Hiroshima, for example, and Dresden, and Auschwitz, and, before any of those, in 1917, the Battle of Passchendaele.
Of course, the Westβs fantastical hellscapes also have indelible masters; think of Hades or Danteβs three-headed Satan or Miltonβs charismatic Prince of Darkness. But what kind of master, I asked myself, do these twentieth-century hellscapes have? Do they have one at all? What would a devil of the old world do if he found himself in the hell of the new one?
Because in any of his mythic or literary guises, Satan, the silver-tongued antagonist, the musician, Miltonβs antiheroβthe Westβs original compelling monsterβwould surely find himself at a loss in the face of such impersonal, inhuman devastation. What use would the lover and exploiter of mortal flaws have for a place that torments without accounting for vice or virtue, a place that renders the infinitely interesting human soul a number in a ledger, a body in drab?
What would he do, what do humans doβwhat do any of us doβwhen thrown, unprepared, into a strange new world?
- Author's Note, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Arden
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