by Walter Owen
Owen is "remembered mostly for THE CROSS OF CARL, a very horrible anti-war novel told in semi-fabular form." - Bleiler, “The Guide to Supernatural Fiction”, p. 39.
“His [Owen’s] World War One novella, “The Cross of Carl: An Allegory” (written 1917; 1931), transgresses more than once against generic expectations with a ruthlessness of Equipoise (a term rarely used to describe early twentieth-century works) that makes it a central text in the history of Fantastika Between the Wars. The brutally realistic Part One describes a minor skirmish in the war, after which the protagonist, taken for dead, is transported in Part Two – bound immovably into a fasces made up of dead companions – to a factory at the end of a siding where the corpses are due to be rendered into pig slop; the tone of this narrative uncannily prefigures World War Two and some industrial aspects of the Final Solution. Escaping from this "Golgotha", the protagonist buries himself in a shallow grave, being aroused by the German Kaiser and a Marshal, who are travelling together. Together they kill the protagonist: which is to say they finish their mutual job of slaughter.” SFF Encyclopaedia.
THE AUTHOR
Walter Owen (1884-1953) Scottish translator, poet and author, who published his early poetry privately as by ‘Gauthier de St Ouen’, the only title surviving in general catalogues being “The Sonnets of G S O: A Memorial” (coll 1940); in 1902 he emigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and apart from occasional excursions elsewhere remained there for the rest of his life. He was a Theosophist. His translations from the Spanish are highly regarded.
EDITIONS
London: Grant Richards, 1931 (UK)
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931 (USA)
Cronklin, Groff (ed) - “In the Grip of Terror” 1951 (Permabooks pb, USA).