The Cross of Carl: An Allegory

First published in 1931, The Cross of Carl is a book describing trench warfare with a visionary intensity. It is a masterpiece of the imagination, and one of the most terrifying books you will ever read. The Times Literary Supplement review, on 16 July 1931, called the book A war allegory that, brings back the ugly side of war psychology; it is a description of one of the ‘corpse factories’ of legend - an unbearably ghastly description… This record of what the author himself describes as an abnormal pathological process induced by the psychic perturbations of the War, is put forward in the belief that the experience may foreshadow some sort of development in the collective consciousness of mankind. It was foresight, in a way, but of something more horrible, which would be the Nazi holocaust of World War II.